The Second Language
Several days ago, I had this talk with some of my friends. It dealt with the distribution of languages in the world: how much a language like, say, English, is widely spoken? Can you really “get along” anywhere with it? things like that.
Today, in my newspaper, I found a nice report about it. The headline talks about “The fourth widely spoken language in the world”, and the newspaper say that it is… Portuguese.
According to the data they bring, The distribution of the most popular languages is:
- Mandrine Chinese - spoken by 1.4 bilion people, at China, Taiwan, and Singapore.
- Spanich - spoken by 400 milion people, at 21 countries, mainly Latin America and Spain.
- English - spoken by 354 milion people, at 7 countries.
- Portuguese - spoken by 230 milion people, at 9 countries that spread over south America (Brazil), Africa (Angola, Mozambic), Asia (Macau), The Pacific (East Timor), and of course - Portugal, in Europe.
Other common languages, such as French or Russian come way behind those languages.
They didn’t say there if they refer to native-tongue or to everybody who knows the language, but I found two facts very interesting: that more people speak Spanish than English, and that Portuguese is so widespread around the globe.
Many people see only the western civilization as their “gold model”. For such, no doubt that English is the most important language - at most western countries, even where the native tongue isn’t English, you can easily get along with it; and when you live in a western culture, knowing English is almost an essential asset for success.
The world, however, is much bigger and many times more diverse. Many people tend to forget it, and it is good that from time to time you get these small reminders, in the form of a surprising statistics, or other - the best way, of course, is to travel.
October 29th, 2006 at 14:49
How many arabic speakers?
October 31st, 2006 at 23:29
As I’ve mentioned in the past, this view - except for being completely wrong - also ignores the fact that the vast manjority of people who know two languages or more, speak also English (to some degree or other). In South and South-East Asia, all people who speak a second language speak English. I think the only continent where the English speakers (as a native tongue or otherwise) do not far outnumber any other count of speakers is South America. maybe.
Now, to dispute the data linked above: Accroding to the list in Ha’aretz, there are 7 “English speaking countries”. But according to Wikipedia, 45 countries have English as the main or only official language. Ha’aretz doesn’t list those 7 English speaking countries, but that list is most probably composed of: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, NewZealand, Ireland and South Africa. This view neglects India, which as we’ve discussed has a large percent of native English speakers, along with several other smaller countries.
To summarize - if you want to learn an additional language to enable you to communicate with the largest number of people in the largest number of countries, then your best bet is still English, and then maybe Spanish but possible Chinese as you’ll find Chinese immigrants almost everywhere
November 1st, 2006 at 10:24
Arabic is number 5 with 200 milion people : http://www.answers.com/topic/arabic-language