Wednesday 11 July 2007

What's the most common language in the world?

Well here's a surprising thing. I think we all probably know that Chinese is the most popular language on earth. 873 million speakers. Probably after English it's the most important one to learn, particularly for younger people who want to be part of the global economy in some way.

But we also all know it looks rather daunting, and it's not the sort of thing we English speakers are taught in school so typically we have absolutely no grounding in it at all. Do we even know how to say yes or no in Chinese? Don't think so. I only think I might know the first four numbers from a Kraftwerk song, but maybe that was Japanese.

Anyway. Take a look at the Wikipedia language rank. Next up, big surprise for me, the second most common language worldwide is Spanish, even more than English.

But take a closer look at the table, and maybe these figures are counting native speakers, in other words, mother tongues, the language people were born with.

Many people learn English as a second language, so if you start to count how many people can speak English (from the 'other estimates' column), then English is second with 980 million speakers.

And if we are playing that game, then it looks like Hindi is next, with 181 million native speakers but 948 million people who can speak it.

So one way or another Spanish is either the second most popular mother tongue in the world, or it's the fourth most spoken language. Either way, for an English speaker, Spanish is probably the first foreign language to learn both because it's not too far from English (they have common roots) and you are perhaps more likely to encounter Spanish speakers either at work or on holiday.

Inneresting.

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