Languages and Empires in 1800 (about 1 billion people in total)

Click here for a map and background to this page.

Click here for estimates on population growth in China and India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh, Japan and Indonesia, contrasted with Russia England and Australia, the US and Canada, Mexico and Brazil from 1 AD to 2019.

The Great Powers or Empires

Intro: Empires have always revolved around having a language, or at least a common writing system for communication purposes. Click Here for a timeline.

In Europe, this became the Latin alphabet with its 26 characters, and with French and Spanish having diacritics (accents) over the tops of certain letters to assist with pronunciation. English, a little more "lazily", or perhaps "Kiss" — Keep it Simple stupid, refused to add those diacritics.

In the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East where Turkish was the common language and Arabic was the language of the Koran and prayer, communication before 1926 was a Turkish variation on the Perso-Arabic script. In 1926 Turkey changed to a Latin based alphabet, adding some additional letters.

Regarding China where Mandarin Chinese was the language of the emperor and a traditional script of characters was used to represent words, peoples learned to pronounce each word their own way in their own dialect.

In looking at their history, China's earliest records show its first dynasty (after the flood) to be the Xia dynasty.
By 1000BC, the census estimate shows 14 million.
In 200BC at the start of the Han Dynasty that finalized the Great Wall and the Silk Road, about 20 million.
In 1AD at the time of Christ, the protection of the Wall took it to perhaps 60 million which it apparently stayed about for the next 1500 years. Sadly, wars and enslavement were commonplace, even infanticide if you were born with little.
Improved conditions and a larger population became their history after 1600. China's census estimate of 300 million in 1800 was higher than any other single country.
Since the 1950s and 1960s, China has developed a simplified script taught in schools everywhere on the mainland. They use a Latin based alphabet (called Pinyin) when typing into computers.

Regarding India, click here for their timeline, the country had just the one "holy" language called Sanskrit, but many writing scripts after the Persians, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Turks, the Mongols, and then in the 1800 census, the British administrators. Today Hindi is the main official language with many able to speak or at least understand English.

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