Mostly a note to myself, on languages.

[randomness]

So, if the intent is to be able to talk to the maximum number of people on the planet, here are the languages I should learn. Numbers vary wildly, so this is only a guide. (Highest estimate for total number of users, native and non-native in millions from each language's Wikipedia page, fetched 29 May 12.):

English 1800
Mandarin Chinese 1020
(Castilian) Spanish 500
Hindi-Urdu 490
Arabic (dialect chain) 340

French 275
Russian 258
Portuguese 252
Bengali 230
Malay 180

Swahili 150
Japanese 127
German 120
Persian 110
Punjabi 104

Turkish 91
Italian 85
Javanese 85
Vietnamese 81
(Jiangxinese) Gan-Hakka Chinese 80

Thai/Lao-Isan 80
Korean 78
(Shanghainese) Wu Chinese 77
Telugu 74
Marathi 72

Gujarati 65.5
Tamil 65
(Filipino) Tagalog 64.3
Pashto 60
(Cantonese) Yue Chinese 56

Dutch/Afrikaans 51
(Hokkien) Min Nan 50
Kannada 47
Oriya 45
Ukrainian 45

Polish 44
Burmese 42

Obviously, diminishing returns set in after a while. But I've made a pretty good start on the first two. Perhaps the plan should be to learn a hundred words in each language, and be able to string them together in some way intelligible to someone who actually speaks the language.

Compiling this list has really brought home to me the messiness of language classification. It has also reminded me how true it is that languages are dialects with flags.

Comments

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

I've sometimes wondered what the order should be if the goal is to share a language in common with as many people as possible. English is still first, of course, but there's at least some chance that Arabic or Hindi would pass Spanish (a lot of Arabic speakers don't speak English as well). How many Hindi speakers speak English? Many, surely, but enough to make a difference relative to Arabic? I have no idea. Still, the top 3 probably stay the same. I bet that further down, though, it would make a lot of difference. But I really don't know, or even how to figure that out.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is similar to the comment spinrabbit made above. I suspect it would take a comprehensive worldwide language census to find out, but perhaps there might be an easier way.

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

I did have a thought about this. You can try to cross-compare by national data. So, for example, Wikipedia says that there are 490 million speakers of Hindi/Urdu. There are 125 million English speakers in India (roughly 12% of the population), and 18 million English speakers in Pakistan (~11%); India and Pakistan account for roughly all of the 490 million speakers of Hindi and Urdu (actually, between the two, I get more than 490 million by adding up various numbers on wikipedia. Obviously, some of the numbers are wrong, especially because there are Urdu speaking populations outside of India and Pakistan). But that puts a floor on the number of Hindi-Urdu speakers who don't speak English at ~350 million, and a reasonable ceiling of about 450 million (assuming 10% of Hindi-Urdu speakers also speak English, i.e. the overall percentage of English as a second language in India and Pakistan). That's enough to almost definitively put Hindi-Urdu ahead of Arabic--even the floor is higher than the ceiling for Arabic (and of course, some Urdu speakers speak Arabic).

You could do a similar analysis for other languages, but the degree of imprecision is huge. Still, I think it strongly suggests that the top 5 would be unchanged.

One of the interesting things that this turns up is some general evidence for the collapse of French as an international language, although that might just be artifacts of data. Still, in light of your experiences recently and the general pattern of English squeezing out French as the international lingua franca, it's interesting.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

You could do a similar analysis for other languages

Hey, thanks for that! It's a useful approach.

One of the other things that really might drop Arabic in particular in the rankings is that "Arabic" really is no more a single spoken language than "Chinese". (See my earlier post.) I don't have any figures on how many people actually speak Modern Standard Arabic, but it's probably a lot less than 340 million. If you consider the different varieties of Arabic in an analogous way that one generally thinks of the different varieties (dialects, languages, what have you) of Chinese, you start having to look at things like Egyptian Arabic (80 million) on its own, the way my very rough list already treats Gan-Hakka Chinese.

That gets into the question of where to draw lines between languages. I'm being relatively expansive with my definitions (Thai/Lao-Isaan, for example) because my interest is intelligibility, but I'm given to understand that most of the users of Maghrebi and Gulf Arabic (just to take a couple of geographic extremes) would have trouble talking to each other unless they were to shift to Modern Standard Arabic.

the degree of imprecision is huge.

Boy, isn't that true? I am really suspicious of any of the numbers I listed from Wikipedia that have more than two significant digits. Sometimes I feel like even that's relying on their numbers way too much. :)

One of the interesting things that this turns up is some general evidence for the collapse of French as an international language, although that might just be artifacts of data.

French usage in particular shows a couple of countervailing trends. On the one hand, it really is becoming less useful in the world in general. On the other hand, more and more people are learning it to talk to each other across Francophone Africa, which is itself a part of the world showing significant population growth.

Language is messy. But you were a linguistics major, many many moons ago, you understand that. :)