If you’re reading this blog post, there’s a good chance that you’re living in a predominantly English-speaking country (I’d say, an 80%+ chance).
According to Wikipedia, the Pareto principle states that “for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”).” That is to say, for most things you encounter in life, it’s safe to ignore 80% of it. Most of the time, you only have to concern yourself with the “vital few” that make up 20%.
20% of causes produces 80% of effects.
More than 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, but half of the world population speaks 23 of them. This is very good news for language-learners. It means that you don’t have to learn every language. It means that if you just learn a few strategic languages, you may be able to communicate with most people on the planet.
So what languages should you learn if you want to communicate with more people on Earth? The answer is not as clear-cut as it may seem at first glance. There are a few complications:
- Many people speak more than one language
- People have different levels of proficiency in each language
- Some languages are similar enough to other languages that speakers can understand each other (with enough gesturing and pointing)
- Languages are highly localized, so knowing Chinese and English may be useless for communication in rural Colombia.
NationsOnline.org gives a list of the top twenty most widely spoken “first languages.” 20% of that is four, and the top four are:
- Chinese (1,213,000,000 speakers)
- Spanish (329,000,000 speakers)
- English (328,000,000 speakers)
- Arabic (221,000,000 speakers)
If you learn those four languages, then you can definitely converse with more than two billion of the over seven billion people in the world. But those numbers are also misleading. There are 328 million “first language” English speakers in the world, but there are also about 328 million people living in the United States alone. England has another 55 million and Australia has over 25 million people. Obviously, there are more English speakers in the world than 328 million. The discrepancy is caused by the millions, if not billions of people in the world who can speak more than one language with various levels of proficiency. So while Chinese may have the most first language speakers, I suspect that English may have the most “second language” speakers.
Statista.com paints a very different portrait of world languages. Rather than tallying “first language” speakers, they estimate total speakers. Here are the top four:
- English (1,348,000,000 speakers)
- Chinese (1,120,000,000 speakers)
- Hindi (600,000,000 speakers)
- Spanish (543,000,000 speakers)
Arabic drops off the list with only 274 million speakers, while Hindi jumps in the list, probably due to there being 48 recognized dialects. But as a speaker of two dialects of Chinese, I can say that people speaking different dialects of the same language generally cannot understand each other. So learning Hindi may not be as advantageous as it looks here. Chinese also has many local dialects, but most people in China can at least speak the official Mandarin dialect of Chinese. I don’t think it’s as uniform in India.
What does this all mean?
To make a broad generalization of our diverse planet, English is the most useful language to learn.
The second most useful language to learn is either Chinese or Spanish, depending on what part of the world you plan to visit. Chinese is obviously more important in Asia. Spanish is obviously more important in South America.
Some places like the continent of Africa are just too large and fragmented to generalize about the most important language (French is your best bet in western Africa, Arabic in the north, and English may be useful in the south).
Duolingo
If you want to learn any of the languages mentioned in this article, try out the Duolingo app. It’s free and I get nothing by mentioning it here. But I’ve tried it (for German) and it’s legit. Now pick a language, learn it, and communicate!
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