You can hardly risk controversy with the claim that English is a more globally influential language today than the Yanomami. To a child's question as to why this should be so, knowledgeable parents would reply that English has hundreds of millions of speakers while the Yanomami could hardly muster 16,000. Really difficult and well-informed children might then point out that in this case Chinese would be the most important language in the world. At this point, the savvy parent would send the brat to annoy someone else. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Every language, including Yanomami, is the most important language in the world to its speakers. Instead of "important" we will use the word "influential" here. Chinese is a very influential language, there's no doubt about it, but is it more so than English? Clearly not. The number of speakers is significant but completely insufficient for a meaningful ranking of languages ​​in order of current global influence, the emphasis is on the word "world". There are many other factors to take into consideration and that is what we will try to do below. Ranking the world's most important languages ​​is not just an idle pastime. The world is moving ever closer together, and this historical development is accompanied by large-scale linguistic adjustments, the most dramatic of which is the explosive growth of the English language. How major languages ​​stand and evolve in relation to each other is important. Like the weather, many developments only make sense if you look at the global picture, and not just narrow parts of it. What does "influential" mean in this context? Each language brings with it considerable cultural, social, historical and psychological baggage. As anyone who has ever had to learn a foreign language knows, doing so in many ways alters one's attitudes and worldview. To what extent, in what form and how deeply these changes actually manifest themselves in the individual student depends on many factors, from the circumstances that led to the decision to learn the foreign language, from the character, intelligence, education and background of the student. student. Theories on this topic need not detain us here. The very discovery that one can actually express the same thing with different words or look at something in completely different ways alone broadens many mental horizons. But not everything. There are fanatical polyglots and it would be naive to argue that knowledge of a foreign language necessarily reduces aggression and the risk of war. It helps if the other conditions are right, but achieving this requires more than just language ability. Leaders of former Yugoslavia expressing murderous sentiments in near-perfect English provide sufficient warning of exaggerated hopes in this regard. No people are more acutely aware of the long-term influence that knowledge of another language can have on their students than the French. . No other language is promoted so aggressively around the world. The French clearly understand that their language is the main carrier of French civilization. Speakers of most other major languages ​​think similarly. However, two great civilizations, the Chinese and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese, actually have an opposite attitude. They consider their civilization so manifestly superior that to impose their language on foreigners was indeed doing them too much honor. They also tend to think that their languages ​​are too complex for strangers to masterclumsy, even if they are too polite to say so openly. Languages ​​expand and contract based on social, cultural, military, scientific, technological, organizational, and other conditions. strengths and weaknesses of their interlocutors. What is now called, in a too simplistic and geographically incorrect way, "the West" dominates the world in countless subtle and not so subtle ways. Although this is often denied for reasons of self-respect, even the rather aloof China has embraced an ideology of Western origin for half a century. With the introduction of Western technologies, Western ideas quietly creep in, along with Western attitudes and languages. That these effects can be absorbed without abandoning one's cultural identity has been demonstrated with enormous success by the Japanese and Koreans. Not all cultures and languages ​​share the inherent strengths of these two. The most fragile cultures may feel seriously threatened by Westernization, but if they wish to participate in the current industrialization of the world they have no choice but to protest.Fig. 2 shows that, as far as languages ​​are concerned, “West” means first of all the English language, followed only with a rather wide gap by French and Spanish. It cannot be emphasized enough that it was not inherent superiority, nor linguistic but historical factors that brought English, French and Spanish to where they are now. Whatever historical factors pushed English to first place, they are still at work and look set to continue. The fact that in 100 AD Latin seemed destined to dominate its slice of the world forever should give pause to any triumphalist impulse. Economic data is easy to collect by comparing it with population data, not to mention languages. Nor does the temptation to manipulate the figures disappear. Few national censuses show much interest in the language, and those that do too often face interference for political reasons. Governments are known to massage the numbers until they are "right". Minorities and unpopular languages ​​are made to disappear or shrink into insignificance, while the numbers of dominant groups are inflated. Sometimes even the most solid linguistic classifications are swept away, as in Turkey, where Kurdish (which is not even remotely related to Turkish) was, for a time, officially reclassified as Mountain Turkic. Census work in many technologically backward and ethnologically diverse countries (the description of which covers a substantial portion of the world) can be downright dangerous. For many people, government is traditionally not the benevolent institution of UN mythology, but the Enemy. Many have no trust or love for their rulers and can be violently suspicious of government agents who ask too many, or even no, questions. Many Westerners, especially academics working in sheltered institutions of established democracies, tend to have a bit of difficulty understanding this fact of life. In a Third World country that will remain nameless because it is not the only culprit, it is common practice for companies to have three sets of books. One for the government, a second for the government tax inspector to assess the size of the bribe he can demand for officially accepting the first set of accounting books, and a third set showing the real figures to the owners. This is, obviously, the first set of data to enter government statistics. World statistics not only add up the data provided by individual countries, but also add up all the falsifications provided along with them. The speed with which iCensus data is processed and published is another issue. Some computerized, technologically advanced countries can publish quickly, but most take years before even preliminary data is published, and by the time they do, it is out of date. In very large and populous countries like India and China, the sheer scale and variety to count is staggering. The Indian census is truly one of the statistical wonders of this world. Even the best censuses in the best organized countries can only ask a few simple questions about languages ​​and must depend on the self-assessment and honesty of the citizens interviewed. What exactly does it mean to "know" a language? The spectrum ranges from an Oxford English professor to a street vendor in a Bangkok tourist area who has a few dozen English words and no grammar to string together. Both the professor and the salesman earn their living thanks to their knowledge of the English language. If questioned in a census, both could honestly claim to "know" English. If a linguist reports that language X uses grammatical feature Y, one can go into the field and verify the fact. No one person can go out and verify the statistical facts. They are like the two sexes among human beings, one must accept the other as he is, with all his defects. Why discuss the problems of census takers and the reliability of their numbers in such detail? Before looking at the graphs in this article, you need to understand how unreliable global data is in general, and especially language data. They are all a patchwork of local, regional and national figures gathered under very different conditions at different times, worked through many stages by people with very different levels of education, cultural backgrounds, loyalties, goals and ideas about accuracy, not to mention competence . . Of course, statisticians are aware of all this and more, as are those who compile official United Nations statistics, but they are reluctant to discuss this aspect of their work. The surreal pseudo-precision down to the nearest 100 speakers is magically projected by UNESCO: it claims that there are 285,077,900 primary speakers of Russian and 1,077,548,100 of Chinese. Figure 3 shows the extent to which global estimates can actually differ if the rationalization routinely carried out by international agencies is removed. English has an uncertainty of well over 150,000,000. Churchill's much-quoted quote about statistics comes to mind, but I will resist the temptation. What keeps the published figures from being totally useless (and turning this article into a complete waste of precious paper) is the fact that all major languages ​​contain much more or less similar margins of uncertainty. In other words, they can still be compared and classified with a fair degree of confidence. The figures on which this article is based are taken from reference works a few years old and collected a few years earlier. In light of everything that has been said so far, the reader will understand that this is of little importance. Since then the absolute numbers will increase, but this will not affect the ranking of the ten most influential languages. If the number of primary speakers of a language is highly uncertain, the number of secondary speakers is pure conjecture. I have included Fig. 6 (whose numbers are taken from a different source than the others, see acknowledgments at the end) more for completeness. What is quite certain is that, in relation to the number of primary speakers, French has the largest number of speakers and Chinese the smallest number of secondary speakers. Foreign students are a small but influential minoritydisproportionate to their number. They tend to belong to the more educated social strata of their countries. As future political, economic, social and cultural leaders, they are an important factor in spreading the acceptability and social prestige of a foreign language. Despite the paucity of even semi-reliable data on the number of secondary speakers, their number is so important. To establish the degree of influence exerted by a primary language, we need to briefly discuss at least three groups of them. Each of them carries a different weight on the scale and the three should be treated differently in any proper statistical analysis, if the figures were reliable enough for one. Immigrants are people who have moved to another country to live there. They often learn the host country's language haphazardly, usually while trying to hold down a job and make ends meet. Their status in the host country is, at least initially, quite low. Only the second generation learns to speak the local language with any fluency. Different nationalities and language groups tend to differ greatly in how they adapt to their new homeland. Some groups quickly dissolve into the host population, leaving barely a trace after a few generations, while others cling to their ancestral way and language for many generations, using the host language only for dealings with the outside world. Immigrant languages ​​in some countries may have a large weight in statistics, but their influence on the host language is usually small. For example, there are sizeable Chinese, Korean, Pakistani, and Indian immigrant communities in Canada and the United States. At home they speak their own language but use English for external contacts. The existence of such communities does not make their languages ​​international. The Spanish of Latin American immigrants is a different case. It is spoken more and more widely in the United States, and controversies over its use in American schools demonstrate how influential it has become. Whether it will successfully establish itself as a second language in addition to English in the United States, only time will tell. The odds of that happening seem good. National minorities are yet another group of "foreign" language speakers, although foreign is a misnomer here. Members of linguistic minorities who do not speak the majority language often find their career, business, social and general prospects diminished if not paralyzed altogether. The influence of minority languages ​​of this type on the majority language is usually small but can accumulate over centuries. All major languages ​​today are growing, both in terms of influence and number of speakers. The higher a language is in the ranking, the faster it will grow. Aside from natural population increases everywhere, this growth comes at the expense of smaller local languages. Hundreds if not thousands of smaller languages ​​are slowly being eliminated. Speakers of some languages ​​have seen the influence of one of the ten largest languages ​​curbed and are expressing their fear of the threatening domination - while at the same time their language is driving smaller local languages ​​towards extinction. Few notice the irony of this and there are strong complaints about linguistic and cultural expansionism. Expansionism is what others do to you that you can't do to them but would do if you could. It is no coincidence that of the top ten languages ​​in the world, only two do not function as lingua francas. The two exceptions are Chinese and Japanese; their difficult and personalized writing systems, and the fact that both are used by essentially monoglot societies in highly limited albeit large geographic areas, has prevented them frombecome the common language of a larger area. Hindi and Urdu suffer from the same limitations, but their home base, the Indian subcontinent, is highly polyglot. The same can be said of the former Soviet Union where Russian, although often with marked lack of enthusiasm, is used willy-nilly as a lingua franca. Looking at the languages ​​shown in Fig. 2 you can see that the higher a language has risen in the ranking, the more important it is as a lingua franca in its area. In relative terms the picture among the top ten languages ​​is not static but one of slow and steady trends. Fig. 13 shows in very broad terms the dynamics of life at the summit over the last 500 years. Let us now examine the top ten languages, one by one. English is the most obvious example of a language on the rise. It survived the fall of the British Empire without even slowing down, it has now gone beyond being the language of the world's only remaining superpower (which would have been a disadvantage in the long run), becoming the world's first truly lingua franca. International English has become independent of any English-speaking country, including the United States. A Korean producer in an Athens hotel meets the Brazilian buyer of a Switzerland-based conglomerate will not only negotiate but order dinner from its room service in English. There may not be a single native English speaker in the hotel, but all non-locals staying there communicate with each other in English, as a matter of course. From a certain level, in business, sports, politics and many other fields, knowledge of English has become not a matter of prestige but a necessity. The level at which this occurs is moving ever lower. English has a total grip on science and technology. With the increasing sophistication of computers it is becoming easier to put even the most inconvenient languages ​​and scripts on the screen, but this does not alter the overall picture. The Chinese trader, scientist, manufacturer who wants to talk to his foreign contacts is not helped much even by the Chinese characters presented with the utmost attention on his screen. You have to tell your non-Chinese contacts in English. It is an open question whether there is room for more than one global lingua franca. I doubt it and, apparently, the famous "market" also doubts it. There is huge interest in learning English practically everywhere in the world. Geography and history have made Mongolia one of the most isolated and landlocked countries in the world until recently, isolated especially from the West and Western languages. Yet, when the country opened up a few years ago, the change was immediately signaled by the signs in English at the capital's airport. Barely noticed by English speakers, a huge boom in English learning has developed around the world, a boom that is unmatched by a similar trend for other languages. It's not a small town in Brazil that doesn't boast at least two English schools. Even in countries with strong cultural ties to France, young people want to learn English, not French. In Cambodia the French government had a painful experience when young people rejected offers from the Alliance Française, preferring instead to sign up to anyone offering English courses, no matter how dubious. In German-speaking Switzerland, pupils must learn French, in French-speaking Switzerland, German. They do this for political reasons, mutual intelligibility is considered important in a multilingual country. Children do not agree with their elders; polls have shown that everyone would much prefer to learn English. The French are rightly saddened by this situation. As well as a certain degree of fashion behind the English boom, there are solid economic and psychological forces at play. English is seen more and morewidely as the language of world trade, economic progress, science and technology, the main window to the world and not just because of the Internet which obviously dominates. French was, until a century ago, in a similar position to English. No one could pass for educated without the ability to speak French. However, French rule has never been as complete as that of its rival today, for the simple reason that 100 years ago much of the world was not yet as connected to the rest as it is today. In Mongolia it was enough to speak Mongolian, in Madagascar Malagasy took you everywhere. Back then we didn't hear about globalization. French has suffered a decline in its global influence especially when compared to English. It has more or less maintained its position compared to the other major languages, but compared to English the situation is grim. France still has bases in many parts of Africa, although the position is crumbling, as recent events in Rwanda and Zaire-Congo have shown. He also still enjoys considerable sympathy in Latin America, where common Latin roots and a certain disgust for English-speaking gringos can still be found. International English is advancing there, but it is still seen more as the language of the United States rather than a politically neutral means of international communication. In Asia, French has lost virtually all of its ground to English, including in Vietnam, where it is the nostalgic language of an older generation. French has a narrow base on which to build its claim as a world language: it is the majority language only in France and a minority language in Canada, Belgium and Switzerland. France's strength in the international field, especially in the diplomatic sphere, is also slowly crumbling. Anyone watching TV can see this erosion taking place before their eyes: more and more international conferences replace French with English labels on delegate tables. In faraway places, from Albania to Chechnya and Georgia, places where English is still used it is a decidedly foreign language: protesters can be seen waving posters in English. They know which language to use to capture the attention of the international media. Despite a clear downward trend compared to English, French remains the most influential second language in the world. Its prestige remains extremely high, not least thanks to the tireless efforts and huge sums spent by the French government, but also by the pride that virtually all French people have in their language. In Hong Kong I once spoke to a taxi driver and congratulated him on his excellent English. He said that he could not do without English in his work but that he now wanted to learn French even though it was not of much practical use to him. He wanted to learn it for his social prestige The ranking of the ten most influential languages ​​is not so much endangered by the main language (which cannot be surpassed again in the foreseeable course of events) as by Spanish. Coming silently from behind, it is spreading rapidly across the United States and could expand even further. Latin America is no longer an economically depressing and often depressed area, it is no longer the backyard of the United States. With growing self-confidence, despite failures, Latin America will increase the value of Spanish (and with it that of Brazilian Portuguese, its close relative) on the global linguistic market. Russian has been held hostage by one ideology for 70 years and around the world. In the empire, language was imposed on subjects by brute force. The situation has changed dramatically since the early 1990s, but Russian will take time to regain popularity outside Russiareal. For many years the newly independent parts of the former Soviet Union were committed to shaking off Russian influence and trying to avoid the use of the Russian language. It turned out to be much more difficult than they had imagined. For many Russian was the only common language and they had no choice but to use it. The situation is still confusing and will take decades if not generations to stabilize. One hesitates to venture a guess, but it is likely that Russia will remain among the top ten languages. Arabic is the only language, besides English and French, that is used in an international "field". It is the language of Islam and as such used in countless Koranic schools between Morocco and Indonesia. It is also the only major stream of international linguistic influence that is entirely independent of the West and as such is little noticed or appreciated there. An interesting development is the struggle for linguistic dominance within the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between German and English. Here is a situation where linguistic features and not historical or political forces can actually make a difference. German is a difficult language to learn, only the three genders can handle it, English is much easier at first. The odds are pretty even, but my money would be on the Englishman as the eventual winner, but I wouldn't bet a large sum. Chinese is a language whose speakers are remarkably uninterested in spreading its use beyond their own people. Although Chinese is not really one but several languages ​​held together by a common script, we will here neglect these finer distinctions and call all languages ​​(usually and misleadingly called dialects) Chinese. It is a principle of linguistic business that to penetrate a market you must know its language. This may apply to most markets, but China is different. Like any other people, the Chinese appreciate it when a foreigner makes the effort to learn their language, but they don't appreciate it if he succeeds. Telling the Chinese that their language was damn difficult and practically impossible to learn brightens their whole day. Everyone can feel proud of having mastered something that is too complex for most others. The Chinese have elevated this sentiment to a national art form. A foreigner who speaks or (even worse) writes excellent Chinese is regarded with grave suspicion. Foreign visitors to China, diplomats and businessmen, have been known to pretend to have much worse knowledge of the language than they actually possessed. Not unlike the Japanese, the Chinese prefer to deal with foreigners in English. Despite the huge number of native speakers, Chinese is not an internationally influential language. Its use is concentrated in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and in communities spread throughout the world, especially large ones in Southeast Asia. With its basis of continental origin it seems sufficient in itself. Chinese has been the historical language of learning in much of the Far East and in the past had a great influence on Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and some other peoples. Its cultural influence has waned dramatically in recent centuries, but one gets the impression that the Chinese at home either didn't notice or didn't care. German has undergone the wildest swings of any major language in the level of its influence. Having entered the 20th century as the primary language of science and technology, it suffered a setback when German lost the First World War, only to recover much of its position in the 1920s. Until the 1930s, chemistry students in the USA were required to have a working knowledge of German. At that time the.