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Most Useful Family | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| rlf1810 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6342 days ago 122 posts - 173 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Slovak | Message 1 of 12 22 June 2009 at 11:58am | IP Logged |
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Hello,
I was wondering what you would say is the most useful language family. That is, if one were to learn most or all of the languages in that family they could do more with their knowledge than if they learnt another family, whether it be communicating with more people or using it for scholarly purposes. So, what do you think? -Robert 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6150 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 2 of 12 22 June 2009 at 1:32pm | IP Logged |
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Indo-European no doubt. As for subfamilies, Germanic, Italo-Celtic (which includes Romance), Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic in that order.
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| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6449 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 3 of 12 22 June 2009 at 4:57pm | IP Logged |
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The question is interesting, but impractical. Your two criteria are “language family” and “useful”. Most language families and branches are large and include a majority of languages that would not be deemed very useful. Language families and subfamilies are sometimes also lumped together based on loose lingustic criteria.
Indo-European – sure, but this one includes several hundred languages. What about the Sino-Tibetan, Sinitic (or simply Chinese) languages? You will have easier time conquering the main languages of several groups than most language families. One exception is perhaps the Romance branch. This is the reason why ambitious people choose to learn English, perhaps German and then a couple of Romance languages (more frequently English plus a Romance language or two). English may be classified as Germanic, but for native speakers of English Romance languages are significantly easier than the no.2 Germanic language. Other Germanic languages except for Icelandic are in the same difficulty group as French etc. and considerably less useful. Italo-Celtic – Linguistically they may share some common features, but for the stated purpose this branch is lame. You need to prune it. The Italic branch and counting only Latin and the major Romance languages is easily the most complete and elegant solution taken as a whole group (and most importantly almost doable but even here you’d need to prune). Another observation: very few people will have the stamina to learn more than a few “useful” languages, this usefulness being the only motivating factor. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rlf1810 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6342 days ago 122 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, German, Slovak | Message 4 of 12 22 June 2009 at 6:00pm | IP Logged |
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Mm perhaps I used the wrong term.. Pardon my ignorance of linguistic terms, but I meant more specific families. Germanic, Romance, Slavic, etc. And this is only hypothetical. Whether it's possible or practical or anything else is not my intention to discuss. Sorry if I was unclear.
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| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6661 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 5 of 12 22 June 2009 at 6:31pm | IP Logged |
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As I see it, the Romance languages are probably the most useful family.
There are four particularly useful Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. If you learn these four, you can get around very well in Latin America and southwestern Europe. You'll find French speakers in the Middle East, Canada and the South Pacific. You'll find Portuguese speakers in Africa, and Spanish is fairly common in the USA. The two most useful Germanic languages are English and German. English is spoken by many people in many different countries around the world. German is useful in Europe, and you'll meet up with German-speakers travelers in many places around the world. Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are interesting languages, but the number of people who speak them is comparatively limited. Quite a few of those people also speak English, German or both. As a result, people tend to study Dutch and Scandinavian languages for love or very specific interests. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ANK47 Triglot Senior Member United States thearabicstudent.blo Joined 7099 days ago 188 posts - 259 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 6 of 12 22 June 2009 at 8:59pm | IP Logged |
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Romance definitely. You can learn 1 language and say that you know 4. Study something like Arabic on the other hand and you have to learn 4 languages before you can say that you know 1.
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| RBenham Triglot Groupie IndonesiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5645 days ago 60 posts - 62 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Indonesian | Message 7 of 12 22 June 2009 at 9:01pm | IP Logged |
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What is "useful" anyway?
For example, if you want to make money as a translator (not that I am recommending it), it might make sense to look for "boutique" languages from the EU. By this I mean languages confined to a small but highly wealthy population. Why? Well the demand for translation in the EU is not linearly proportional to the population; there are certain types of documents that need to be translated for each country, regardless of its population. On the other hand, people in wealthy countries with small populations all learn English to a reasonable level in school. So there is little motivation for foreigners to learn their language. The result of all this is that, while there is no shortage of XX natives who know English, there are very few natives of other languages (most importantly here, English and French). Translators should work into their native language, and so you can see a potential shortfall in the supply of XX>EN and XX>FR translators. So if it is your aim to make money as a translator, it might pay to look into small but "wealthy" European languages. Where does this leave us with choice of language family (since redefined as sub-family)? Unless I have forgotten one or two, it seems that the rich EU countries with small languages are the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. With the exception of Finland, their languages are all Germanic (even in Finland, Swedish has official status). If you confined yourself to the Germanic languages, you would have a choice of English and German (hardly a useless pair of languages), but also Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic. There is also Luxembourgish and a host of minor dialects, but these do not enter the picture for present purposes. Luxembourg is one of the richest countries in the world, for example, and Luxembourgish has recently been elevated to the status of "national language", but this is a largely symbolic gesture: French remains the main administrative language, supplemented by German. Similarly, the locals all learn French and German at school, and later English, and so you will not enlarge the ambit of people you can talk to by learning the "indigenous" language if you already know one of these languages. If you want to study it out of linguistic interest, or if you live in the country and don't want to feel left out of animated discussions in the language (or just want to know what people are saying about you), fine; but it probably won't help you in any practical way. That said, the Germanic languages would be a good group to concentrate on if you want to make a living as a translator. For travel, it depends on where you want to travel. If you want breadth, then obviously there is no comparison, assuming you already know English (if not, please STOP READING NOW!). After Britain, Spain, France and Portugal were the biggest imperial powers, and they have left their linguistic legacy in North America, South America, Africa and even Asia. Knowledge of French is not uncommon among educated people in the former colonies in Indo-China. (By contrast, Indonesia seems to have almost totally forgotten its Dutch.) So learn the Romance languages. If you want to maximize the number of people you can communicate, learn Chinese! Even without the cognate languages (and it is not entirely clear what these are), it covers a huge population. If you want to work for the CIA, learn Arabic (which is almost a sub-family in its own right), and, in the same family, Hebrew wouldn't hurt either. If you want to work in oil and gas, but not in the Middle East, there are always the Slavonic languages.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6449 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 8 of 12 22 June 2009 at 9:29pm | IP Logged |
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"Useful" as defined by the original poster includes maximizing the knowledge that could be obtained by learning a specific group of languages, including scholarly purposes.
The weight of English in the modern world is such that the Germanic family would easily take the crown if you’re rigid and unyielding in your criteria with the caveat that 98% of your bang per buck/hour of study would be in just two languages. You’d also have to learn Icelandic, which is as difficult as Hindi or Russian for native English speakers. If you look at usefulness per language within a group Romance languages win hands down. All the other major groups have only one or two languages that may be described as “major” and as a group cannot successfully compete with English even if you could somehow magically fuse them into one language. English may be described as an isolating language, and if you look at it this way, one can bend the rules. If you look at only one criterion and more specifically the number of speakers English/Germanic or Chinese would win depending on your definition of "speaker" and "Chinese" but keep in mind that Romance languages as a group come close to a billion speakers (first and second language). Chinese speakers are also more concentrated in one area of the world. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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