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The world's most influential languages
- leonastra 14y agoСпасибо за статью. Печально, что русский язык не входит в десятку наиболее используемых языков в Internet.
- asparagui 14y agoПросто начните холодная война снова :D
- guard-of-terra 14y agoSorry to ruin a joke, but this sentence is not valid.
- derleth 14y agoGoogle Translate again: "Just start a cold war again: D" (Google Translate doesn't quite 'get' smilies, apparently.)
- guard-of-terra 14y agoWhen measured how? Data in a table at the bottom of the article is extremely stale - 2007! Russia now boasts the biggest Internet audience of all European countries. Add to that a formidable number of Russian speakers in other countries, and Russian surely outgrosses Korean and Italian on the Internet. (I am not sure that number of speakers online is the one and only measurement of "language usage on the Internet")
- hetman 14y agoYou seem to be talking about a "potential" audience. Statistics for actual usage is quite different.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoNope. It's actual monthly audience. Got any (recent) data?
- hetman 14y agoWhen of the other guys posted some stats in their post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531152 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531152
- derleth 14y agoLet's see what Google Translate makes of this: "Thank you for the article. It is sad that the Russian language is not included in the top ten most used language on the Internet."
- democracy 14y agoThe article is old, if you open the link they refer to, you will see that the Russian is there: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
- Locke1689 14y agoIs this a winner-takes-all, network effects situation? Are we going to see the entire world speaking English as at least a second language in the next 50-100 years?
- jimmyjim 14y agoThe research the article talks about was done in 1990, so the dynamics as to the influence of top-spoken languages may well have changed. Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2] On a slightly unrelated note, what is interesting is that Hindustani, despite being one of the most spoken languages, has such little influence. Unlike for Chinese or Russian, there is relatively little resistance in it being completely dominated by English as the "business language" in the very areas that the language is native to. [1]: Some schools in African countries, located near areas where there is Chinese involvement, are teaching Chinese: http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0601-200602/A.Hoogenbosch%5B1%5D.pdf http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0601... -- elsewhere in Americas and Europe there has also been a noticeable bump in people trying to pick up Chinese as their second language. [2]: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
- hugh4life 14y ago"Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]" Counting the total number of speakers is not a very smart way of thinking about "network effects" of languages. You should count the number of speakers among knowledge and media creators. People will have to learn those languages to gain that knowledge and understand that media.
- batista 14y agoIt's not the '60s - 90's anymore, when US had the stronghold on global cultural creation/consumption. There are many signs that this is starting to fade, and for huge masses of people it was never true in the first place. E.g Chinese people could not care less about english media and knowledge. But people wanting work in China/Asia might very well care about learning english.
- alister 14y agoLooking at the advances in machine translation and speech recognition in the last 10 years, how long before fluency in English becomes irrelevant? If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)
- jethroalias97 14y agoAlthough much changes with technology, much remains the same. People have had the technological ability to communicate solely through telephone/computer for many years which easily beats face to face communication in terms of efficiency in a geographically diverse group, but people are still shelling out money for plane tickets. There is something to be said for the ability to chat to someone about a ball game without speaking and hearing through a machine. Although I'd say human to human and human to computer communication are very different, I'd agree with you that some languages are objectively better. There are ancient tribes that don't have words for numbers above two. Esperanto seems to be one of the easier languages to learn, at least for those already fluent in european languages. But when it comes to adoption, culture and ubiquity seem to be the most important factors.
- batista 14y ago>If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.) Well, not only that. English usage will also drop because of long term economic and cultural effects. English had commerce, hollywood and popular music going for it. But billions of people in emerging middle classes now, e.g in China and India, get their own "hollywoods" and music on, and they also get at least equal footing in the world trade-ways (commerce). With a large cultural industry and commercial opportunities, they'll be just like Americans that could not care less about non-english speaking content (movies, books, series, webpages, songs, etc).
- hugh4life 14y agoThe "cultural" enterprises will segment and diversify, but business, tech, and science will all converge on English. Anyone from those other "hollywoods" will have to use English to reach a global audience.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoWhat? The USA doesn't have an official language (like in one recognized by government)? That's news for me, and it's interesting to think on the implications. I'll point that next time an american complains to me on the web to "speak english".
- rogerbinns 14y agoHave a Today I Found Out story all about it: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/08/the-united-states-doesnt-have-an-official-language/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/08/the-united-s...
- mhartl 14y agoThere have been various attempts to make English the national language of the United States, but they have all failed, due in part to being perceived as vaguely racist or xenophobic. This is especially strange considering that virtually every other country does have an official language (or languages). That said, you (and your potential interlocutors) will likely benefit from using the lingua franca, which is currently English, whether or not you're exhorted to do so by an American.
- corin_ 14y ago> This is especially strange considering that virtually every other country does have an official language (or languages) My assumption for why it isn't strange is that most countries had an official language (whether at one point it was decreed, or if it just happened naturally) before a huge amount of immigration happened in the way that it has in America, i.e. that now there are huge numbers of Spanish speakers in a number of states.
- NonEUCitizen 14y agoThat there are huge numbers of Spanish speakers in a number of states is not due to immigration. Most of these states spoke Spanish before they had an influx of English-speaking illegal immigrants. The English speakers (helped) split these states off from Mexico and made them join the USA. (Okay, the reason they spoke Spanish is due to the prior illegal immigration of Spanish conquistadors). Which is why, in Silicon Valley, you have city names like San Jose, Santa Clara, Los Altos, Palo Alto, San Mateo, San Bruno, and San Francisco; and road names like Junipero Serra, San Antonio Road, and El Camino Real.
- jonchris 14y agoIt's not Indo-European. It's Indian language Sanskrit which is mother of all languages influenced English. Due to people can't accept that they carry something which is borrowed or adopted, they started adding their names in it. It's the bitter truth.
- jonchris 14y agoIt's not Indo-European. It's Indian language Sanskrit which is mother of all languages influenced English. Due to people can't accept that they carry something which is borrowed or adopted, they started adding their names in it. It's the bitter truth.
- iRobot 14y agoThe world is really no longer divided into countries or geographic regions (although politicians like to think otherwise), I feel I have a lot more in common with a programmer in Germany, France or China than the red-neck farmer who lives up the road. We communicate in English simply because the USA dominates (and continues to dominate) the technology and science areas.
- mhartl 14y agoStrange that they didn't include quantity and quality of media available in a given language, unless it's somehow covered under "Socio-literary prestige" (which is never precisely defined). This metric may be English's biggest source of influence.
- meric 14y ago"It should be a sobering thought, however, to any triumphalist impulse that in 100 AD Latin looked set to dominate its slice of the world forever." The winner of the "Top Language of 100 AD" should go to Chinese circa 100 A.D. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic The following languages are heavily influenced by written chinese: Korean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji Vietnamese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language As well as a variety of other languages (though the regions where they are from are now considered part of China): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Other_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Other_langua... Moderately influenced: Mongolian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_language Thai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language Here is a picture of Han China and Roman Empire circa 100 A.D. http://www.roman-empire.net/maps/empire/extent/rome-china-comparison.html http://www.roman-empire.net/maps/empire/extent/rome-china-co... Written Chinese still dominate its slice of the world. While not all chinese are conversant with Standard Mandarin, (I am not), almost all of them can read and write chinese.
- Retric 14y agoIt really depends on how you define a language and a speaker. I have heard estimates that English is currently the most spoken language of all time. (at least on earth). With over half of the worlds population being familiar with at least a few words, 1.8 billion people with basic competency, and a steady trend of English words being adopted into most other living languages.
- archangel_one 14y agoYou can make a similar list for Latin though; the Romance languages are (by definition) descended from it; that's Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese, and English and German are heavily influenced by it. That's a significant majority of the score of the top ten languages from the article, so you can argue that by their standards Latin is more significant, even though it's no longer really a living language in its own right.
- zik 14y agoI wonder about the credibility of this article given that it talks about "Chinese" as if it were a single language. There are many spoken languages in China (most notably Mandarin and Cantonese). They share a common written form but if you're talking about the "most influential language" surely the spoken languages should count for something.
- mbell 14y agoWhere do you draw the line? Is Latin American Spanish separate enough from Spain's Spanish? Is French different from Canadian French? American vs British English? Even southern US English vs northern US English? Being from the north and visiting the south regularly I can attest that its very difficult to understand the 'deep locals', granted its sort of a French-English creole. Northern German vs Southern German? I was in Munich for Oktoberfest 4 years ago and I was surprised to find Bavarians speaking to northern Germans in English most of the time. They told me they couldn't understand each other and hated each others accents so using English was easier. It seems extremely difficult to determine and relatively arbitrary where the distinction between 'explicit' languages is made.
- hetman 14y agoThe various languages in China do not begin to even approach anything like mutual intelligibility. They are not dialects but separate languages, much in the way Spanish and Romanian are different languages even though they both started as Latin.
- zik 14y agoMandarin and Cantonese are different languages, not dialects of the same language.
- vorg 14y agoThese ranking ignore the fact Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than any other two languages in this top ten listing. Although Spanish and Portuguese are now two separate unintelligible languages, they were virtually the same 800 years ago. Someone literate in one can easily learn the other; it's probably the same with fluency. Machine translation between them is probably very accurate because of their relative closeness and the huge volume of sample data for both languages. Also... Because of geopolitics, Brazil and the rest of Latin America can easily negotiate compromise agreements where they say "put the administrative center for this in Brazil and make Spanish the official language for it". So perhaps there's more of a case to consider Spanish and Portuguese to be one language for these rankings, than there is to lump all the unintelligible Arabic dialects (Morrocan, Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, and Gulf) into one language, or the unintelligible Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Minbei, Minnan, Xiang, Gan) into one language.
- pjmlp 14y agoYes, as Portuguese I also have an issue with his bias for Brazilian Portuguese, as there are many more countries speaking the language. - Portugal - Brazil - Angola - Mozambique - Green Cape - Saint Thomas and Prince - Guine-Bissau - East-Timor Probably a few others might still use some dialect of the language as well. Actually Portuguese was the same as Galician not Spanish. Spanish is actually Castilian from Castile region. In 1516 Ferdinand II declared it as the official language of Spain, hence Spanish. But you're right about the language similarities.
- zalew 14y agoI spoke Brazilian Portuguese and even back then it was relatively hard for me to understand Portuguese the original due to pronounciation/accent differences (by relatively hard I mean I had to focus). I had less problems understanding Spanish, say, in Uruguay. To this day, although I forgot the language, I can easily spot a Brazilian in a crowd of talking people while it takes me a moment to recognize someone speaking European Portuguese. > many more countries speaking the language. maybe more, but not with 200 million people
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- LoseThosMan 14y agoThis topic is stressing. God says... C:\Text\WEALTH.TXT e of their land and labour, would fall, and would be expressed or represented by a smaller quantity of silver than before; but their real value would be the same as before, and would be sufficient to maintain, command, and employ the same quantity of labour. As the nominal value of their goods would fall, the real value of what remained of their gold and silver would rise, and a smaller quantity of those metals would answer all the same purposes of commerce and circulation which had employed a great
- perfunctory 14y agoI find Fig. 13. (Rise and fall of major languages: the historical dimension) quite interesting.
- PostOnce 14y agoFig. 3 lowest estimate for # of English speakers is < 300M? What? Current population of the Anglosphere (Australia / Canada / New Zealand / United Kingdom / United States) = 435M; I'll eat my hat if <75% of the population of these countries speak English. That's saying nothing of all the other Europeans, Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Latinos that speak English. Like the Dutch don't also speak English!? What the hell was that estimator smoking? Hell, the max estimate there (~500M) is probably closer to a reasonable minimum.
- AngryParsley 14y agoThe figures in the article are from 20 years ago. Back then, populations were smaller and many countries were just ramping-up English education for students.
- PostOnce 14y agoI didn't catch that, thanks. Curiosity killed the cat, so: Population of Anglosphere in 1992: 364M... <300M speakers still seems very low even 20 years ago.
- Fred22 14y agoIndonesian/Malay is spoken by around 268 million people. It is sometimes rated as the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, yet George Weber barely mentions it. Indonesia itself has 237 million people, of which almost 100% speak Indonesian/Malay. The Indonesian/Malay language is a huge gaping hole in George Weber's research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers#Indonesian.2FMalay_estimates_.28total_number_of_speakers.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...