Big language claim in Hickman’s Black Monday Murders

I came across an interesting line about language in Jonathan Hickman’s comic The Black Monday Murders.

If you ask any competent linguist what’s the most spoken language on Earth, they will tell you – with some assurance – it is Mandarin, and they would be wrong.

Since we first learned to grunt, man has possessed a universal language, and it remains a language everyone on the planet still speaks.

Mathematics.

Issue #2 of The Black Monday Murders by Jonathan Hickman (w), Tomm Coker (a), Michael Garland (c), Rus Wooten (l).

The character who says this is a professor, although I’m not sure of what subject. History, maybe? The professor is right and wrong with his assessment of the most spoken language on Earth. But there are a few things that make it hard to be so clear cut with such a statement.

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