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Why care about the number of speakers? | ||
Tags: Number of speakers | Reasons for study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5174 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 26 of 37 31 October 2010 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps people will consider me a philistine, but I still hold to the idea that a small number of speakers does make learning a language impractical, even if by "small" we are talking about 100 000, 2 million or whatever because language materials will be sparse and often consist of incomplete grammars, lexicons, etc. Speakers would not be very interested in speaking to you in the local language, prefering the more international dominating major language in the region. Many of the "minor" languages have no written form ... surely unless you are a professional linguist there would be little point in learning such languages? I do accept there are important exceptions such as Welsh with a long history, etc., but even in this case almost all Welsh speakers are bilingual and would probably consider it strange for someone with no emotional attachment to Wales to learn it. Believe me I am in favour of keeping minority languages alive, but I don't think learning one would be high on my list of priorities.
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| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5650 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 27 of 37 31 October 2010 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I mean as in "Learn language X, since it has 150 million speakers as opposed to language Y, because it only has 100 million speakers." I've seen some posts on this board where people have suggested learning one language over another because of that.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 37 01 November 2010 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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For me the important thing is not the number of speakers in itself, but the number of speakers I'm likely to meet during my travels OR who write/speak on the internet (about things I find relevant). And I have been impressed with the activity of several small language communities, such as the Irish one - and also the community formed by Esperanto learners, for that matter.
On the other hand most African and many large Asian languages are both difficult AND pointless to study because those cultures haven't produced enough stuff on the internet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5197 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 29 of 37 01 November 2010 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've just read through this thread, and I think most contributors agree with the OP that deciding which language to learn next simply by the number of speakers is definitely... flawed, in some ways. Although to each their own, I say!
The size of the population of speakers, as many have pointed out, is an important factor for several reasons, which are fairly obvious and not worth being reiterated. I'm not against learning small languages, but I'd like to defend studying the biggies... especially those with wide international use. I speak English and Spanish, and have studied French and Arabic. If I were given endless time, I would advance my Arabic and French, and then move onto Russian. If I had another lifetime, perhaps I'd throw Mandarin into the mix. Why? Look at the map! What country in the world would not have a significant number of students of the previous languages? As an avid traveler, the linguae francae of the world are certainly more appealing and useful than the linguistic rareties like Icelandic and Zulu, no matter how beautiful they may be. For the sake of clarity, though, I must re-iterate that everyone is entitled to pursuing their own objectives and are equally justified in that sense. If you want Icelandic and Zulu, go for it! Edited by nebojats on 01 November 2010 at 1:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 31 of 37 01 November 2010 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||
And for good reason. Spanish over Catalan, Russian over Ukrainian, etc., every time. Unless you're in the middle of a nationalistic nuts stronghold hell-bent on building a newfound national identity through monolingualism or something like that, should you dedicate your time to the language just half the speakers around you speak, or to the one 99.99% of them speak? Doh! That's not really a decision you make based on numbers alone: in such cases you don't choose between somewhat overlapping sets of speakers but between a set (speakers of the 'national' language = ALL but that old woman from a lost village in the mountains) and a subset. Of course, if you are bored or have loads of spare time you could learn them both. But that's usually unlikely. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 32 of 37 01 November 2010 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, I can say this much: I never knew how much I was missing out on in Foshan until I started learning Cantonese. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone under 50 who doesn't speak fluent Mandarin, while there are many northerners who haven't learned Cantonese, but Cantonese is intertwined with the culture and it's the language locals speak among themselves. Everyone speaks much more freely and feel more relaxed speaking Cantonese and the warm smile you get when addressing people in their own language instead of the national language is incredibly rewarding. I could have gone through my entire stay here with nothing but Mandarin and not have any communication problems whatsoever. But my experience would have been vastly different. If I had to choose one language for staying in Foshan, I'd recommend Cantonese over Mandarin any time, despite the fact that a substantial number of people don't speak it. Speaking Mandarin, when talking about language, I got a lot of "in Cantonese we say it this way". Speaking Cantonese, people love showcasing the rich and colorful expressions in their language. Many feel that Cantonese is a lot more expressive than the government-regulated, standardized "Common speech", and I tend to agree. In short, there's a lot more to language than just encoding a message so that the recipient can understand it. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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