In a previous post, i wrote that the Russian Empire was a bad joke when compared to the Portuguese empire. For sure some were confused about it so let me elaborate a little further. The most famous Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, who lived between 1988-1935, once wrote in his widely known Book of Disquiet "my homeland is the Portuguese language".
And so if we think about it, the ratio of people born in Portugal/Portuguese speakers in the world is almost 25 and this number will grow to around 45-50 in the next decades. The ratio of Russia is just less than 2 while the ratio of Spain is around 10 (the Spanish language would need to have more than 1 billion speakers just to have the same ratio as Portugal, but that will not happen not even by 2060 when the ratio of this country will reach 14). The ratio of the UK is less than 10 and even the ratios of countries like India and China are also much lower than Portugal. Of course, I´m referring to the number of speakers as the first language.
PS - The aforementioned Book of Disquiet was written in the aftermath of the First World War and on it Fernando Pessoa wrote the following "No empire justifies breaking a child's doll"
