The world's most influential languages

Yes, as Portuguese I also have an issue with his bias for Brazilian Portuguese, as there are many more countries speaking the language.

- Portugal

- Brazil

- Angola

- Mozambique

- Green Cape

- Saint Thomas and Prince

- Guine-Bissau

- East-Timor

Probably a few others might still use some dialect of the language as well.

Actually Portuguese was the same as Galician not Spanish. Spanish is actually Castilian from Castile region. In 1516 Ferdinand II declared it as the official language of Spain, hence Spanish.

But you're right about the language similarities.

Have a Today I Found Out story all about it: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/08/the-united-s...

There have been various attempts to make English the national language of the United States, but they have all failed, due in part to being perceived as vaguely racist or xenophobic. This is especially strange considering that virtually every other country does have an official language (or languages).

That said, you (and your potential interlocutors) will likely benefit from using the lingua franca, which is currently English, whether or not you're exhorted to do so by an American.

Many of the states don't have official languages either and of those that do several are bi-lingual. I grew up in Maine which doesn't have an official language but has a de-facto standard of English and French. The northern parts of the state have a very heavy french canadian influence and several towns use French more than English in signage as well as orally.

English not being the official language of the US means some certain other countries could more easily accept it as an expedient language for international discourse.

The research the article talks about was done in 1990, so the dynamics as to the influence of top-spoken languages may well have changed.

Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]

On a slightly unrelated note, what is interesting is that Hindustani, despite being one of the most spoken languages, has such little influence. Unlike for Chinese or Russian, there is relatively little resistance in it being completely dominated by English as the "business language" in the very areas that the language is native to.

[1]: Some schools in African countries, located near areas where there is Chinese involvement, are teaching Chinese: http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0601... -- elsewhere in Americas and Europe there has also been a noticeable bump in people trying to pick up Chinese as their second language.

[2]: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

That certainly seems plausible. In some fields, such as aviation, English is mandated by international agreements.

In others, such as much of the sciences, it is a de facto standard. Almost all high impact science journals are in English, for instance.

I suspect that what we'll eventually end up with is that most people will speak TWO languages as their native language. It's just so damned easy for kids to pick up two languages if they are exposed to both of them early.

We'll first go through a stage where English is widespread as a second language, learned in elementary school or high school. Arguably, we are getting close to that now in many countries, such as most of Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Many of those people will use English enough at home, either on purpose for their children's benefit or because of the large amount of English content on the internet, for their children to grow up bilingual speaking both English and their parent's native language.

There is a natural monopoly in a lingua franca, or common tongue. The original lingua franca was a Mediterranean trading language that drew principally on Italian [1]; with modern communications and media linking the world, this monopoly is now global, and the monopolist is English. This became particularly clear to me last year as I traveled the world on a circumnavigation. In Thailand, the signs are in Thai and English. In Singapore, they are in Chinese and English. In the United Arab Emirates, they are in Arabic and English. In Ireland, they are in Irish and English.

English owes its status principally to the political dominance of English-speaking nations—roughly speaking, Britain ruled the world in the 19th century, and America ruled it in the 20th—but it's not a bad choice as languages go. It has a rich technical vocabulary, relatively simple grammar and syntax, and an alphabetic writing system based on the widely supported Roman alphabet. Its only plausible competition is Chinese, due mainly to the massive number of native Chinese speakers, but Chinese writing is so difficult [2] that it's hard to imagine it ever competing successfully with English: although the latter's idiosyncratic spelling is legendary [3], even a mediocre alphabetic system is still much easier than Chinese.

Some people worry that advocating the use of English is an act of cultural imperialism [4], but this issue arises only because for English speakers the native tongue and the lingua franca happen to coincide [5]. It's easy to see the fallacy if you consider the possibility of a different lingua franca; for example, if Swahili were the lingua franca, I would advocate its use, and would strive to master it myself. As luck would have it, I get to be lazy and coast on my native tongue, but if you haven't yet mastered English, it would be much to your benefit to do so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

[2] http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

[4] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

[5] In physics, we would call this a degeneracy.

Просто начните холодная война снова :D

When measured how?

Data in a table at the bottom of the article is extremely stale - 2007! Russia now boasts the biggest Internet audience of all European countries. Add to that a formidable number of Russian speakers in other countries, and Russian surely outgrosses Korean and Italian on the Internet.

(I am not sure that number of speakers online is the one and only measurement of "language usage on the Internet")

Let's see what Google Translate makes of this:

"Thank you for the article. It is sad that the Russian language is not included in the top ten most used language on the Internet."

The article is old, if you open the link they refer to, you will see that the Russian is there:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

The figures in the article are from 20 years ago. Back then, populations were smaller and many countries were just ramping-up English education for students.

It really depends on how you define a language and a speaker. I have heard estimates that English is currently the most spoken language of all time. (at least on earth). With over half of the worlds population being familiar with at least a few words, 1.8 billion people with basic competency, and a steady trend of English words being adopted into most other living languages.

You can make a similar list for Latin though; the Romance languages are (by definition) descended from it; that's Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese, and English and German are heavily influenced by it. That's a significant majority of the score of the top ten languages from the article, so you can argue that by their standards Latin is more significant, even though it's no longer really a living language in its own right.

Where do you draw the line? Is Latin American Spanish separate enough from Spain's Spanish? Is French different from Canadian French? American vs British English?

Even southern US English vs northern US English? Being from the north and visiting the south regularly I can attest that its very difficult to understand the 'deep locals', granted its sort of a French-English creole.

Northern German vs Southern German? I was in Munich for Oktoberfest 4 years ago and I was surprised to find Bavarians speaking to northern Germans in English most of the time. They told me they couldn't understand each other and hated each others accents so using English was easier.

It seems extremely difficult to determine and relatively arbitrary where the distinction between 'explicit' languages is made.

Although much changes with technology, much remains the same. People have had the technological ability to communicate solely through telephone/computer for many years which easily beats face to face communication in terms of efficiency in a geographically diverse group, but people are still shelling out money for plane tickets. There is something to be said for the ability to chat to someone about a ball game without speaking and hearing through a machine.

Although I'd say human to human and human to computer communication are very different, I'd agree with you that some languages are objectively better. There are ancient tribes that don't have words for numbers above two. Esperanto seems to be one of the easier languages to learn, at least for those already fluent in european languages. But when it comes to adoption, culture and ubiquity seem to be the most important factors.

>If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)

Well, not only that. English usage will also drop because of long term economic and cultural effects. English had commerce, hollywood and popular music going for it.

But billions of people in emerging middle classes now, e.g in China and India, get their own "hollywoods" and music on, and they also get at least equal footing in the world trade-ways (commerce).

With a large cultural industry and commercial opportunities, they'll be just like Americans that could not care less about non-english speaking content (movies, books, series, webpages, songs, etc).

Perfect translation is going to be hard. For an everyday most common 5,000 words that may be ok but anything outside of that would require the invention of many new words when English likely already has them. They don't really mean anything in English either - for example "quantum mechanics" are just two words, and have to be learned even for English speakers. When coming from another language you may as well use whatever words others are already using. You can see that happening when other language speakers adopt English words.

There are other factors - English speakers readily adopt words from other languages as needed. This makes it a lot easier to expand. Compare with the Académie française: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise

Look at what people all over the world are constantly bombarded with - Hollywood's output is shown (and popular) everywhere. As are words like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Nike and Apple. Even Bollywood is including increasing amounts of English in its output. Popular entertainers in various countries have also taken to singing some or all of their songs in English.

Look at generating input. There is a bias to a reasonably small number of symbols. A 500 key keyboard isn't practical (although variations exist). Having many modes and switching amongst them isn't that pleasant either. We already see people dropping case from English where is it mostly cosmetic. (Of course voice recognition is always around the corner but isn't practical in many environments and has always been around the corner.)

It is acceptable to speak English "badly" - did I tell you about the time that: the mat cat sat upon? I've heard from speakers of other languages that just getting the gender wrong in a sentence is enough to make it extremely hard to understand.

My prediction is that the number of speakers of English as a second language will continue to climb since it is the most friction free way of communicating in many circumstances, and that will rapidly lead to their kids adopting it as a first language. Heck all the people I know who have a non-English language as their first language have their kids speaking English as their first language.

TLDR: English makes a very good lowest common denominator

I'm not sure if Google Translate is cutting edge but I would imagine it's pretty close to that. For Finnish atleast it's not really any better than BabelFish was 10 years ago. You can get the gist of things most of the time but there are still huge errors and misunderstandings in anything that's not super-basic.