Dear reader,
have you ever considered to learn another language but you were not sure which one to learn? The world becomes more and more globalized and therefore it could be useful to learn another language.
But since our time is limited, we need to invest it carefully and wisely. In the case of language learning it means choosing the right language to learn.
There are many people who have a general interest to learn another language. Given the general interest, I‘ll look on this question only from a general perspective. As a consequence, the answer will be general as well. A safe bet would be consequently a good international language.
Hence, I won‘t consider dead languages - like Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew or Sanskrit - and sign languages. And I won‘t consider aficionado‘s langauges such as Modern Greek either.
This caveats aren‘t of course arguments against those afore-mentioned languages. If you have an inclination for a particular language, by all means, learn it. If you want to do for instance business in China, learn (Mandarin) Chinese; if you want to live in Latin America, learn Spanish or Portuguese and so on and so forth.
In the next step I‘ll define four main criteria in order to find the best international languages.
I‘ll apply those defined criteria in the second step to all existing languages. In the third part you‘ll find the results.
I. Main criteria
I think that there are basically four main criteria which make a language to an international or world language.
(1) A particular world language should have a large total number of speakers.
(2) It should have also a large number of second language speakers (L2), i.e. people who teach, learn and use it outside of the country of its origin. And of course, the higher the level at which the people speak the language the better.
(3) It should be spoken in a lot of countries all over the world.
(4) It should be spoken ideally not only in a lot of countries but also in more than one continent.
II. The criteria applied
(1) Languages by the first main criterion (large number of speakers)
The first main criterion is: The language should have a large number of speakers.
There are at least 6000 natural languages in the world as some linguists claim. In order to see which languages fit the first criterion we need to rank them by the number of speakers and take the top 25 ones with more than 50 million native speakers each. The outcome is this list of languages in alphabetical sequence:
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Source of the underlying data is the Ethnologue: Languages of the World: https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size
(2) Languages by the second main criterion (L2 speakers)
I apply here the second criterion of course only to the languages I found by the first criterion. The second criterion is: It should have also a large number of second language speakers (L2), i.e. people who teach, learn and use it outside of the country of its origin. And of course, the higher the level at which the people speak the language the better. There aren‘t unfortunately many numbers about the languages which are being learnt globally.
Spanish, French and to a lesser degree German are the globally most studied languages. In the east, people learn or used to learn Russian. In Asia, there are basically three studied languages: Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-worlds-languages-in-7-maps-and-charts/
http://making.duolingo.com/which-countries-study-which-languages-and-what-can-we-learn-from-it
(3) Languages by the third main criterion (countries)
In the last step, we have seen that the following languages made it to the list: Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.In this case it is easier to kick out the languages which are spoken only in one or few countries than to check the rest of the languages. Those are Japanese and Korean.
I have to disagree with any criterion that excludes Mandarin simply because it is not spoken on multiple continents. China is a relative newcomer as a global economic and technological power but it surpasses the French, Russian and Spanish speaking countries in most essential metrics. More importantly, Mandarin is quickly gaining in importance as China assumes an increasing central role in the world economy.
Thanks for commenting!
Mandarin is of course an important and interesting language. And moreover, it has growth potential.
But the international language is by far English.
As a L2 Mandarin is predominantly learnt in Asia. Yes, in the U.S. it‘s also learnt. But to what level of proficiency and what percentage?
Be that as it may, I can‘t see for the moment that, for instance, a Japanese and a Spaniard will speak Mandarin when they meet each other, let's say, in South Africa. However, that‘s what it takes for a language to be considered as an international language, at least for me.
Let me know what you think about it!
I am taking a Mandarin class at a local university. We are all adult students and several do business in China. They are all American citizens and all speak English but one is Hispanic, one is from Pakistan and another is from Ethiopia in Africa. China is attracting business people from around the world and many are choosing to learn Mandarin to improve their ability to negotiate and build relationships with suppliers and customers. For now, English is the de facto world language but if you can speak English, Spanish and Mandarin you can communicate with 80% of the world population.
Haha I just posted a top 5 about languages and come to see this :)
"Top 5 Most Spoken Languages In The World 2017"
Thanks for commenting! Feel free to post your link beneath. I hope I can do the same under yours.
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STOPWhich of those languages have you learned yourself? I am looking forward to a report about actually learning these languages :).
Thanks for commenting! I speak German, English and Italian. I've also learnt Russian to a basic level and I do French.
I speak all these languages and Spanish, Portuguese and some others. Any reason you didn't say anything about Esperanto?
It's a constructed language and it has no native speakers. Does it have pragmatic value?
How many people speak it?
There are several million speakers, many new people learning it, more than a million right now on Duolingo, and it has between 200 and 2000 native speakers, several of them being my personal friends. It has pragmatic value in preparing you for speaking other languages and in having a network around the world you can fall back on wherever you are for hospitality and other services. Also it's simply worth on its own because you have real friendship around the world really easy and fast. My best friends are through Esperanto. Without Esperanto I wouldn't be speaking 11 languages now.
Fine!
https://steemit.com/esperanto/@lapingvino/101-reasons-to-learn-esperanto
What about Esperanto?
https://steemit.com/languages/@johano/the-other-international language
We're targeting Russian and Mandarin early on our VR platform.
https://steemit.com/vr/@astralship/is-language-learning-a-killer-app-for-vr