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

[spinrabbit.livejournal.com]

I am guessing that if one had stats on speakers of the language who don't speak another language higher on the list, you'd probably get some of those Indian languages dropping down the list, and some African ones shoehorning themselves in.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm guessing you're right about that. I wish I had some way of finding that information, but that would probably require actual field research as opposed to poking at Wikipedia. :)

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

hmmm... If the goal is to share a language with the maximum number of people on the planet, this list makes sense. But if the goal is to actually be able to talk to the maximum number then wouldn't you need to re-order the list to the places you intend to visit?

I'm looking at Polish there at the bottom of the list. If I could somehow learn Mandarin Chinese in the next four weeks or learn Polish in the next four weeks, I'd end up able to talk to more people by the end of the summer by choosing the latter, because I'll be spending three weeks in Poland.

I still want to be able to pick up languages much more quickly than I can, though. I admire your polyglotism.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Well, so the intent was kind of to give myself a guide to where I should go learn languages. I hope to visit most of the Earth, so the answer to "where do you intend to visit" is "oh, most places".

It's mostly a thought experiment anyway. My intended list of places includes a lot of cities with transit systems. :)

I can get about ten words out in Polish, including "carrot" and "juice", to which there is a story. This isn't all that useful, because the situation is as spinrabbit points out. A lot of people in Poland actually speak some other language also, whether it's English (greatly preferred, and considered "cool"), German (much less preferred, but commercially necessary), or Russian (a last resort).

I still want to be able to pick up languages much more quickly than I can, though.

Oh, me too.

I admire your polyglotism.

Mostly, this is an accident of birth, but thanks!

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Here's my newly acquired useful Polish word, and my mnemonic for remembering it:

I picture an elderly, P-town man. He's sun-toughened and maybe balding. He's also a flaming gay man in the classic old P-town 1920's writers' style. He's got a wicked Boston accent, and drinks only Bombay Sapphire.

He's a Gin Quee-yah.

It means Thank You.

If he helps out the set of Scooby Doo, Daphne might call out Gin Quee, which is Thanks.

Ideally I'd know Please, Thank You, Excuse Me, Yes, No, Coffee and Help as absolute bare minimum in a language for a place I'm going, even if I can easily find another language I do speak. But I forgot the others, and it was hard to hear in the softer sounds over the road noise in the car, so that's all I remember right now. Plus it's the only one for which my brain served up a really good visual mnemonic. :)

[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.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

How about if I tag along when you go to India, and brush up on my Hindi beforehand. :)

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Awesome! That means I can sort of talk to a whole lot of people!

[eclectician.livejournal.com]

The other interesting question is how many words you need to know to be really effective in the language. I just keep thinking of the Chinese stat - you know, of the howevermany pictograms, you need to know a relatively small number to be really effective with the language.

[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.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me!

(I've already picked up a copy of Teach Yourself Beginners Hindi Script so that I have some chance of reading signs.)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It is an excellent thing, yes!

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I found that there's a noticeable difference between knowing ten words and knowing a hundred. (And, for that matter, knowing two words and ten.) But I think how many may depend on one's definition of "really effective".

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Cool! Yeah, being able to read the signs is fun. Especially amusing when it turns out to be English words, transliterated into Devinagari.
Have you learned to read Arabic script? I never got far with that one, but mastering that skill really should be on my bucket list.

[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.

[sarakate.livejournal.com]

I find it hysterically funny that "bathroom" is not on your absolute minimum list... but "coffee" is.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Heh. A lot of people have pointed that out to me. :)

I can only hazard that this oversight is because in a public place there are signs with symbols on them pointing to bathrooms. In museums, theaters, restaurants etc., you walk toward the kitchen area or some part of the building that architecturally is likely to have a plumbing stack in it, and usually its right there, with a sign, often with symbols accompanying or instead of words. You don't usually need to ask anyone's permission, you just walk through the door.

But for coffee, you can be staring right at the damned machine, but still have to have the person who controls the coffee deliver it to you.

[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. :)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Especially amusing when it turns out to be English words, transliterated into Devinagari.

Yeah, the book has examples of that. Funny!

Have you learned to read Arabic script? I never got far with that one, but mastering that skill really should be on my bucket list.

I haven't! It was something I was hoping to learn in the class I never got to take. :(

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

A variation on this is how and why I learned the words for "carrot juice".

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I once formulated my "list of languages that would enable you to talk with any educated (secondary education) person":

English, Mandarin, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Swahili, Japanese

To some degree, this is not a ranking. E.g., German doesn't make the cut because though German is widely spoken through central Europe, almost all of them know other languages. Whereas French and Spanish are widely used through their former empires on other continents.