Came across a blog post today ‘The 30 Most Spoken Languages of the World’. As usual Mandarin was at the top, but it seemed somewhat surprising (perhaps just an anglo-bias) that Spanish was in second position ahead of English. The rest of the top 10:
- 885m - Mandarin
- 332m - Spanish
- 322m - English
- 235m - Arabic
- 189m - Bengali
- 182m - Hindi
- 170m - Portuguese
- 170m - Russian
- 125m - Japanese
- 98m - German
The list sure seems interesting, but without background information it is really not all that useful. For the average person traveling and working abroad 500 Million people in the middle of nowhere in Africa or somewhere could put that language way up into that listing … but does it have any importance? I would be interested how you link these languages to GDPs or figures like that … now I bet English moves up and maybe there will other changes as well.
Just a thought though … also … future outlook indices would be nice …
Mandarin of course stays important …
Hi Stephan–about ‘the middle of nowhere’
I find language a fascinating ’sometimes’ reflection of cultures and thoughts; in Chinese one says ‘big house’, in English we say ‘every-one’.
I’d like to think that every ‘one’ is at least an ‘average and important person’ and with the internet these days ‘travel, working abroad’ and other languages are just a few clicks away. Sometimes things don’t have to be ‘useful’. For me Africa is quite close to home and it wouldn’t hurt me to speak a bit of Zulu or French. For that matter ordering a taquito and enchiladas also makes my tummy quite happy.
Languages are a distinctly ‘human’ characteristic and sometimes only one person speaks a language, and other times a billion people speak it–the list is a count of every ‘one’ and makes a point about humanity–not total flurocarbons consumed. 大家好。
it seems it has changed already….
1 Mandarin Sino-Tibetan Chinese Characters 1051 China, Malaysia, Taiwan
2 English Indo-European Latin 510 USA, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand
3 Hindi Indo-European Devanagari 490 North and Central India
4 Spanish Indo-European Latin 425 The Americas, Spain
5 Arabic Afro-Asiatic Arabic 255 Middle East, Arabia, North Africa
6 Russian Indo-European Cyrillic 254 Russia, Central Asia
7 Portuguese Indo-European Latin 218 Brazil, Portugal, Southern Africa