Worldcat records by language - easy comparison

Worldcat records by language

Worldcat catalogues holdings from more than 69,000 libraries from all over the world. As of December 2008 the catalogue lists more than 125 million bibliographic records and 1.4 billion individual holdings in over 470 languages and dialects.

Results are based on language codes in MARC records and the form of language name on Library of Congress Subject Headings.

A word of caution. Although new libraries from all over the world are constantly coming online, Worldcat is still heavily oriented towards the English-speaking countries and their foreign language collections. The numbers will fluctuate as library membership becomes more international. It is interesting to note that the list of top Worldcat languages resembles the list of Wikipedia languages ranked by the number of articles (top three: English, German, French). Languages like Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese and Polish rate rather high.

Number of bibliographic records:
125,012,234
Number of holdings:
1,354,341,279

Records with linguistic content:

English 40,180,000
German 8,765,000
French 4,491,000
Spanish 3,038,000
Dutch 2,319,000
Chinese 1,693,000
Japanese 1,560,000
Russian 1,313,000
Italian 1,181,000

Portuguese 772,000
Polish 664,000
Czech 398,000
Arabic 380,000
Hebrew 346,000
Swedish 321,000
Danish 294,000
Korean 259,000
Indonesian 245,000

Turkish 175,000
Hungarian 148,000
Serbian/Croatian 135,000
Greek, Modern 131,000
Norwegian 117,000
Persian 109,000
Thai 107,000
Ukrainian 104,000
Hindi 101,000
Vietnamese 102,000

Tamil 84,000
Croatian: 80,000
Romanian 76,000
Urdu 75,200
Yiddish 61,315
Catalan 58,000
Bengali 56,000
Serbian 53,000

Dead/liturgical languages:

Latin 797,000
Greek, Ancient 32,000
Sanskrit 24,000
Church Slavic 4,919
Middle French 3,313
Middle English 2,773
Pali 1,850
Old French 1,713
Old English 917
Egyptian 643
Old Norse 592
Sumerian 72

Sub-50,000 records:

Slovak 35,000
Armenian 32,100
Malay 30,000
Lithuanian 26,300
Slovenian 25,700
Burmese 23,300
Estonian 19,100

Georgian 12,200
Albanian 11,200
Tagalog 10,140

Mongolian 7,300
Khmer 4,900

Pashto 3,650
Mayan 2,200
Bosnian 2,000

Quechua 773
Ainu 29

African languages:

Swahili 5,800
Amharic 5,033
Yoruba 2,480
Hausa 2,525
Zulu 2034
Xhosa 1,415
Oromo 504
Igbo 472
Bantu (other) 1,100