Thus, with a certain degree of satisfaction, I present to you: the "Top Ten" languages of the world.
1. English
2. French
3. Spanish
4. Russian
5. Arabic
6. Chinese
7. German
8. Japanese
9. Portuguese (Brazilian)
10. Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu)
Well, I'm glad that this has been settled once and for all. If you are the type of person who simply must know what sort of statistical methodology was used to construct this clearly definitive list, check out the link.
This is actually a pretty straightforward list, though. If we sat a random group of 20 people together, I would guess that the list looks something like this. I mean, if I were sitting down and contemplating what language to learn next, I would probably choose one of these (I have English, German and Arabic now, and Spanish is my next one). Of course all ranking formulas are going to be heavily biased (Indo-European languages say what?) but this at least makes sense to me.
ReplyDeleteIf it's true I'm not sure it's a bias. The Indo-European family dominates in terms of number of speakers, economic/cultural power, geographic distribution... pretty much any metric you can think of. Unless you make an "all languages are inherently equal" type argument, I think the list is pretty accurate - to the extent that these things can be quantified.
ReplyDeleteI think this list is probably a bit different now, given that the article is 15 years old. I'd probably bump Spanish up, drop Russian quite a bit, French not as much.
Of course, there are tons of other political problems here. Lumping Hindi and Urdu together is somewhat justifiable given that the two are mutually intelligible. Chinese is not, however, although I would argue that Mandarin is probably influential enough to justify its spot without including speakers of the Wu, Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc. The biggest thing, though, is Arabic. Obviously the Arabs love to think that they are all culturally unified and share the same language, but anyone who has been to the region can tell you that's BS. If a Moroccan and an Iraqi are speaking the same language than Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (through in Icelandic for good measure if you want) should all be considered "Scandinavian". Now, Scandinavian might still not make the list because none of these countries are particularly large, but going on the Arabic model, you could probably lump together "Slavic", (or at least unify East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic). Again, if everywhere had the same policy as Arabic, then everyone from Portugal to Romanian would probably be speaking various vernacular dialects of "Romance" (or perhaps "Vulgar Latin" if you want to be nostalgic about such things).