Kramer
Joined: 27 Aug 2006
Posts: 16
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 Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 7:51 am Post subject: Rating the world's most influential languages |
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As part of my TEFL research, I came across this link which discusses which languages are most spoken and most influential:
http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm
I was surprised to learn that more people have learned French as a second language than English (presumably because of Africa) And at how few Mandarin second language speakers there are worldwide.
The most important comparison is the last, which weighs each important language by six factors in order to derive an influence factor for each. I was surprised at the strength of French and Russian influence. The quoted data below, which is just part of the info in the link, is about 10 years old, so I suspect that influence of both countries has waned a bit since then, especially Russian, and Chinese/Mandarin has probably increased some.
Kramer
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Thus, if you add the secondary speaker populations to the primary speaker populations, you get the following (and I believe more accurate) list:
(number of speakers in parentheses)
1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
2. English (480 million)
3. Spanish (320 million)
4. Russian (285 million)
5. French (265 million)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
7. Arabic (221 million)
8. Portuguese (188 million)
9. Bengali (185 million)
10. Japanese (133 million)
11. German (109 million)
The following is a list of these languages in terms of the number of countries where each is spoken. The number that follows is the total number of countries that use that language (from Weber, 1997):
1. English (115)
2. French (35)
3. Arabic (24)
4. Spanish (20)
5. Russian (16)
6. German (9)
7. Mandarin (5)
8. Portuguese (5)
9. Hindi/Urdu (2)
10. Bengali (1)
11. Japanese (1)
The number of countries includes core countries (where the language has full legal or official status), outer core countries (where the language has some legal or official status and is an influential minority language, such as English in India or French in Algeria), and fringe countries (where the language has no legal status, but is an influential minority language in trade, tourism, and the preferred foreign language of the young, such as English in Japan or French in Romania). For a complete breakdown of each and an accompanying chart, click here.
After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige), Weber compiled the following list of the world's ten most influential languages:
(number of points given in parentheses)
1. English (37)
2. French (23)
3. Spanish (20)
4. Russian (16)
5. Arabic (14)
6. Chinese (13)
7. German (12)
8. Japanese (10)
9. Portuguese (10)
10. Hindi/Urdu (9) |
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