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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Top World Languages & My Favorites

The order of the most used languages in the world cannot be accurately determined because of the decision to count only native speakers or all speakers, the lack of current data, and the source of the data. A chart of some differences can be viewed here. They all, however, leave out Indonesian, which should be somewhere in the top 10/12.

For my purposes, I'll use the Ethnologue's 1999 statistics:
1. Chinese (including 5 dialects)
2. English
3. Spanish
4. Russian
5. French (including 2 dialects)
6. Portuguese
7. Arabic (including 10 dialects)
8. Bengali
9. Hindi/Urdu
10. Japanese
11. German

Ranking by total number of countries the language is spoken in:
1. English: 115
2. French: 35
3. Arabic: 24
4. Spanish: 20
5. Russian: 16
6. German: 9
7. Mandarin: 5
8. Portuguese: 5
9. Hindi/Urdu: 2
10. Bengali: 1
11. Japanese: 1

I like looking at these lists because I like to think about what new languages I should try to learn when/if I have the opportunity to do so. All the languages I've considered learning in the future include (in no particular order): French, Spanish, Russian, Latin, Italian, Mandarin, ASL, German, Irish Gaelic, Arabic, Portuguese, Old English, Middle English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, Swahili, and Zulu. It's quite a list, huh?!

For now, my highest to-be-fluent-in languages are French, Russian, Spanish, Latin, and Mandarin. I know the most in French and am obviously going to improve on it during my time in France. I also took four and a half years of Spanish and one year of Russian, so I would like to continue my progression in those. For my interest in reading and writing, Latin simply makes sense as a language to learn, and it could come in handy for future novel writing. Mandarin would also be good to learn since it has the most speakers worldwide and because of China's growing influence; you never know when it could be useful!

Realistically speaking, I don't know that I could be fluent in more than my top five foreign languages (because even that will be a huge challenge), but I dare to dream!

What is your opinion on what languages are the best to learn?
If you're bilingual or a polyglot, which language is your favorite?

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