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#2 international language is...? | ||
Tags: Language Importance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6644 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 17 of 19 07 February 2012 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Turning back to the original question of the thread, I suppose it depends on what your definition of "international language" is, and for me it would be a language the knowledge of which would allow you to communicate with people in X number of different parts of the world/countries/whatever, and the higher X is, the higher it would climb on the list of international languages.
This would put English at #1 by a mile, and then #2, I would think, would be something along the lines of Spanish or French. I can't think of any others off the top of my head. Does my reasoning make sense to everyone? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6343 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 18 of 19 07 February 2012 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that for a language to be "useful", it should have many speakers that cannot speak another more common lanugage. Hindi for example would be excluded since many of its speakers know English. If this is how you see usefuleness, then the most useful languages would probably be Chinese, Russian and Spanish.
How you rank these afterwards depends on how you measure usefuleness; you could count the total number of speakers, or you could compute the total GDP of a language's speakers, or compare the jobs that require each languages, etc.
On a related note, China Unicom is one of if not the only large firm offering customer service in Esperanto. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6660 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 19 of 19 08 February 2012 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Superking, I agree with you in theory about communicating with people in X number of countries or parts of the world.
However, this becomes difficult to quantify. If you speak a "medium-sized" language such as Dutch or Hungarian, you might find rather small communities of fellow speakers in a number of cities around the world. If a few hundred speakers of Hungarian live in Tokyo, is that enough to add Japan to the list of countries where that language is spoken? French might still be the #2 language. Spanish is a contender, but such a large proportion of Spanish-speakers are in one admittedly large part of the world--the Western Hemisphere. Beyond Europe, French is spoken in Canada, some islands in the Caribbean and South Pacific, and a few African countries. This list is admittedly incomplete. Another factor is that a considerable number of people in many other countries have learned French even though they live in places where French has no official status and they are not of French descent. Arabic is another possibility. Arabic is spoken in many western Asian and northern African countries, and more people in the West are choosing to learn Arabic. Muslims around the world learn Arabic to read the Quran. Nevertheless, it seems like it's still easier to find French-speaking people in a greater variety of places than Arabic-speakers. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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