Fig. 1. The main factors that make a language influential.
Background Reading - General Linguistics
Top Languages - the World's ten most influential languages
by George Weber
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This article was researched by George Weber in the early 1990s and written up in 1995. It was first published in the now sadly defunct and still missed Language Today by the magazine's editor, Geoffrey Kingscott (a founder member of the Andaman Association), in December 1997 (Language Monthly, 3: 12-18, 1997, ISSN 1369-9733). Heartfelt thanks are due to Geoffrey as without him, this article would never have been written, let alone published. Ever since its first appearance, the article has attracted a surprisingly high and steady level of atttention. It has been quoted from at conferences ( "every language is the most important language in the world - to its speakers" or "expansionism is what others do to you that you cannot do to them but would if you could"). It has also been reprinted, including the "American Association of Teachers of French (ATTF)" National Bulletin, vol. 24, 3:22-28, 1999, which publication had the following little introduction that is worth reproducing here in full: Since the Winter issue of the "ACTFL Newsletter" appeared reporting in a brief paragraph a ranking of the world's "ten most influential languages", we have repeatedly seen the same paragraph appear in state and local foreign language newsletters. While the paragraph cites some criteria used in the ranking, it has left us curious about the original article. After much searching we were able to find the British publication Language Today and the specific article reprinted here, with the kind permission of the editor, Geoffrey Kingscott. The article appeared under the rubric "Geolinguistics" . We decided to reprint the article in its entirety, despite its length, because its density and its complexity make it difficult to summarize or extract other than in the very brief form we have all seen, as previously indicated. We hope you will find it interesting as well as be warned away from any sense of security or smugness about the second place of French after English. Because we have had so many inquiries for copies of the article, we have put the text on our web-site in 2003 where anyone interested can read and download it. In 2008 the the graphs were moved from the upright (which made them a little difficult to read on a computer screen) to the horizontal. A few minor points and typing errors were also updated resp. corrected. Supplementary information (like the items that have been newly added at the end of the article) will be added as and when appropriate. May 2008 |
1. What makes a language "influential"?
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Fig. 1. The main factors that make a language influential. |
Each field is weighted in importance which is reflected in the maximum number of points that could be assigned to individual languages for that field. The six fields chosen are
1. Number of primary speakers: max. 4
points
2. Number of secondary speakers: max. 6 points
5. Economic power of countries using the language: max. 8 points
4. Number of major areas of human acitivity in which the language is
important: max. 8 points
3. Number and population of countries using the language: max. 7
points
6. Socio-literary prestige of the language: max. 4 points (plus an
additional point for being an official UN language)
Twenty major languages were then assigned a number of points in each field and the points added together and the top ten were ranked accordingly. C'est tout, as the French would say. No advanced maths or quantum physics required. Assigning points in this way inevitably involves a certain degree of arbitrariness. To check the robustness of the ranking I have tested the point system to destruction with reassuring results: it would have needed obviously absurd valuations to affect the ranking of the top ten languages given in Fig. 2. The only exception has been Portuguese and Japanese which came in with the same number of points. I have have given Japanese priority because of its relatively stronger economic power. However, if Brazil continues its present economic expansion, the two languages will soon have to be ranked together or reverse position.
2. Results
presented here are based on data that was collected
between the early 1980s and mid 1990s - is updating needed?
No, updating is not needed. The number of speakers of all the top ten languages have gone up in the last quarter century but relative to each other, the situation among the top ten remains unchanged. George Weber, 2008
One hardly risks controversy with the statement that today English was a more influential language world-wide than Yanomami. To a child's question why that should be so, the well-informed parental brush-off would be that English had hundreds of millions of speakers while Yanomami could with difficulty scratch together 16,000. Really difficult and well-informed off-spring could then point out that in this case, Chinese would be the most important language of the world. At this point, the experienced parent would send the brat off to annoy someone else.
Every language, including Yanomami, is the most important language of the world - to its speakers. Rather than "important" we shall here, therefore, use the world "influential" in its stead. Chinese is a very influential language, no doubt about it, but is it more so than English? Clearly not. The number of speakers is relevant but quite insufficient for a meaningful ranking of languages in order of current world-wide influence, the stress being on the word "world-wide". There are many other factors to be taken into account and this is what we shall attempt to do in the following.
Ranking the world's current top languages is not just an idle past-time. The world is growing closer and this historical development is matched by large-scale linguistic adjustments, the most dramatic of which being the explosive growth of the English language. It does matter how major languages stand and evolve in relation to each other. Like the weather, many developments make sense only if one looks at the world-wide picture, not just parochial bits of it.
What does "influential" mean in this context? Each language carries 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 world view. To what extent, in what form and how deeply such changes actually manifest themselves in the individual learner depends on many factors, the circumstances that have led to the decision to learn the foreign language, the learner's character, intelligence, education and background. Theories on this subject need not detain us here. The very discovery that one can actually express the same thing in different words or look at something in totally different ways alone widens many a mental horizon. But not all. There are polyglot fanatics and it would be naive to claim that knowing a foreign language necessarily reduces aggression and the risk of war. It helps if other conditions are right, but more than linguistic skill is needed to bring that about. Leaders in what used to be Yugoslavia spouting murderous sentiments in near-perfect English provide sufficient warning of exaggerated hopes in this respect.
Fig. 2. The Top Ten languages of the world.
The graphic shows that, as far as languages are concerned, "The West"
means first and foremost the English language, followed only after a
rather large gap by French and Spanish. It cannot be stressed enough
that it is not inherent superiority, not linguistic but historical
factors that have put English, French and Spanish where they are now.
Whatever the historical factors that have pushed English into the top
position, they are still at work and look like continuing.
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.
No people are more acutely conscious of the long-term influence that knowledge of another language can have on its learners than the French. No other language is promoted so aggressively all over the world. The French clearly understand that their language is the main carrier of la civilisation française. Speakers of most other major languages think along similar lines. However, two major civilisations, the Chinese and to a lesser extent the Japanese, actually take the opposite attitude. They consider their civilisations so manifestly superior that pressing their language on foreigners was really doing them too much honour. They also tend to think their languages far too complex to be mastered by clumsy strangers, although they are far too polite to say so openly.
Languages expand and shrink on the back of the social, cultural, military, scientific, technological, organisational and other strengths and weaknesses of their speakers. What is today called, over-simplistically and geographically incorrectly, "The West" dominates the world in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. While this is often denied for reasons of self-respect, even stand-offish China has for half a century embraced an ideology of Western origin (and is now boosting its standing with a capitalism that had also been invented in the West). With the introduction of Western technologies, Western ideas slip in quietly, along with Western attitudes and languages. That these effects can be absorbed without abandoning one's cultural identity has been shown with huge success by the Japanese and Koreans. Not all cultures and languages share the inherent strengths of those two. More fragile cultures can feel seriously threatened by Westernisation but if they wish to participate in the ongoing industrialisation and globalisation of of the world, they have little choice beyond making protesting noises.
Fig. 3. Uncertainty: how estimates of the number of people speaking a language vary.
Why discuss the problems of census takers and the reliability of their figures in so much detail? Before the charts of this article are looked at, it has to be understood just how unreliable world-wide figures generally are - and especially those concerning languages. They are all a veritable patchwork of local, regional and national figures collected under wildly different conditions at different times, processed through many stages by people with wildly different levels of education, cultural backgrounds, loyalties, aims and ideas about accuracy, not to say competence. Of course, statisticians are aware of all this and much more, as are those compiling the official UN statistics, but they are reluctant to discuss this aspect of their work. Surrealistic pseudo-precision 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 world-wide estimates can in fact differ if the streamlining is removed that is routinely carried out by international agencies. English has an uncertainty of well over 150 million! The much over-quoted Churchill saying regarding statistics comes to mind - but I shall resist the temptation.
What prevents the published figures from being totally useless (and turning this article into a complete waste of valuable bytes or paper) is the fact that all major languages carry very roughly similar margins of uncertainty. In other words, they can still be compared and ranked with a fair degree of confidence. The figures on which this article is based are drawn from reference works a few years old now ("now" being the 1980s to the 1990s) and collected a few years earlier still. In view of all that has been said here so far, the reader will understand that this matters little. The absolute figures will have increased since then but that will not affect the ranking of the ten most influential languages.
If the number of primary speakers of any language is highly uncertain, the number of secondary speakers is pure guesswork. I have included Fig. 6 (the numbers of which are drawn from a different source to those of the others, see the acknowledgements at the end) more for the sake of completeness. What is fairly certain is that in relation to its number of primary speakers, French has the most and Chinese the fewest secondary speakers.
Fig. 4. Numbers of primary speakers: the top twenty languages:
Despite the dearth of even semi-reliable data on the number of secondary speakers, their number is such an important factor in establishing the degree of influence exercised by a major language that we have to discuss briefly at least three groups of them. Each brings a different weight onto the scale and the three would have to be treated differently in any proper statistical analysis - if the figures were reliable enough for one.
Foreign students are a tiny minority but influential out of all proportion to their numbers. They tend to belong to the most highly educated social strata of their own countries. As political, business, social and cultural leaders to come they are a major factor in spreading the acceptability and social prestige of a foreign language.
Immigrants are people who have moved to another country to live there. They often learn the host country's language in a haphazard way, 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. The various nationalities and linguistic groups tend to differ enormously in the way they adapt to their new homeland. Some groups rapidly dissolve into the host population, leaving barely a trace after a few generations while others cling to the ancestral way and language for many generations, using the host language only for dealings with the outside world. Immigrant languages in some countries can loom large 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 USA. They speak their own languages at home but use English for their outward 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 USA and the controversies around its use in US schools shows just how influential it has become. Whether it will successfully establish itself as second language besides English in the USA only time will tell. The chances of this happening appear good.
National minorities are yet another group of "foreign" language speakers, although "foreign" here is a misnomer. Members of linguistic minorities who do not speak the majority language often find their career, business, social and general prospects curtailed if not crippled altogether. The influence of minority languages of this type on the majority language is usually small but it can add up over the centuries.
4. Ranking the Language Families
Fig. 5. Number of primary speakers by language family.
The Indo-European
Language Family
includes besides many other languages, Bengali, English, French,
German, Hindi/Urdu, Italian, Marathi, Panjabi, Persian, Brazilian
(Portuguese), Russian, the Scandinavian languages, and Spanish
The Sino-Tibetan
Language Family
includes besides many other languages, Burmese, the various
Chinese dialects and languages (e.g.Mandarin and Cantonese), Thai and
Tibetan
The Niger-Congo
Language Family
includes besides many other languages, Ful and Yoruba
The Afro-Asiatic
language Family
includes besides many other languages Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew and
Somali
The Austronesian
Language Family
includes besides many other languages Indonesian/Malay, Javanese,
Malagasi, Tagalog and many Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian
languages
The Dravidian
Language Family
includes besides many other languages Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and
Telugu
Japanese is a language isolate
The Altaic Language
Familyo
includes besides many other languages Azerbaijani, Monglian, Turkish
and Uzbek
The Austro-Asiatic
Language Family
includes besides many other languages Khmer (Cambodian) and
Vietnamese
Korean is a language isolate
5. The importance of secondary speakers
Fig. 6.Secondary speakers are people who speak one or more languages in addition to their first (home, mother or primary) language. The more secondary speakers a language has, the wider its influence in the world tends to be.
6. The basis of linguistic influence
It is no coincidence that of the world's top ten languages only two do not function as lingua francas (a lingua franca is a language used as a means of communication between people otherwise speaking different languages). The two exceptions are Chinese and Japanese; their difficult and custom-tailored systems of writing and the fact that both are used by essentially monoglot societies in sharply limited if large geographical areas has prevented them from becoming the common language of a wider 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, though often with a marked lack of enthusiasm, is willy-nilly used as lingua franca. Looking at the languages shown in Fig. 2 it can be seen that the higher a language has climbed up the ranking pole, the more important it is as lingua franca in its area. In the case of English, that "area" is the world.
All major languages today are growing, in influence as well as in numbers of speakers. The higher up a language is on the ranking pole the faster its growth. Apart from the natural population increase everywhere, this growth takes place at the expense of smaller, local languages. Hundreds if not thousands, of smaller languages are being pushed slowly out of the way. The speakers of some languages have seen the influence of their own language checked by one of the ten top languages. They then usually profess a fear of being dominated - while at the same time their own language in turn is driving smaller local languages towards extinction. Few even notice the irony of this and loud are the complaints about linguistic and cultural expansionism. Expansionism is what others do to you that you cannot do to them but would if you could.
Key to figs 7, 8, 9 and 10. The borders between the three groupsare often fluent or controversial.
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Core countries are countries in which the language enjoys full legal and official status (at least de facto) and where it is the normal language of communication, its speakers a majority or at least substantial minority. Examples: Japanese in Japan; Spanish in Spain; English and French in Canada |
Outer Core countries are countries in which the language has some official or legal status (variously described as auxiliary, associated, or recognised, etc) and where it is the language of a more or less sizeable but always influential minority. Examples: English in India, French in Algeria |
Fringe countries are countries in which the language has limited official or legal status and is understood and spoken by a minority. The language is influential as the language of trade and tourism, and is also usually the preferred foreign language of the young. Examples: English in Japan, French in Romania, Spanish in the USA |
Fig. 7. Number of countries using the language as main medium of communication or as major lingua franca.
Fig. 8. Population of countries using the language.
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Fig. 9. Percentage of population in core countries that do not speak the language of the majority. |
Fig. 10. Gross national
product (GNP) in the early 1990s of countries using the language.
In relative terms, the ranking among the top ten languages is not
static but one of slow, steady trends. Fig. 13 below shows in very
broad terms the dynamics of life at the top over the last 500
years.
Note added in 2008: The trends continue and accelerate. The world
economy has changed almost beyond recognition in the 15 or so years
since the figures for the graphic below were collected. The core
English-speaking countries have come under some pressure but this has
not slowed down the growth of English as world language. Quite
the opposite! The world is not learning Chinese more than before, but
the Chinese learn English in staggering numbers, as do a growing
number of citizens of many other countries.
7. The Top Ten Languages, one by one
Let us now look at the top ten languages, one by one.
English is the most obvious example of a language on the way up. It has 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 in the long run would be a liability), becoming the first truly world-wide lingua franca. International English has become independent of any one English-speaking country, even the USA. A Korean manufacturer in an Athens hotel meeting the Brazilian buyer of a Swiss conglomerate will not only negotiate but order dinner from his 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 upwards, in business, sport, politics, science and many other fields, a knowledge of English has become not a matter of prestige but of necessity. Also: the level at which this occurs is moving ever downwards.
In science and technology the grip of English is complete. With growing computer sophistication it is becoming easier to put even the most awkward languages and script on screen but that does not alter the big picture. The Chinese trader, scientist, manufacturer who wants to talk to his foreign contacts is not helped much by even the most carefully presented Chinese characters on his screen. He has to tell his non-Chinese customers - in English.
It is an open question whether there is room for more than one global lingua franca. I doubt it and so does, it seems, the famous "market". There is an overwhelming interest in learning English practically everywhere in the world. Geography and history has made Mongolia one of the most landlocked and isolated countries in the world until recently, isolated especially from the West and from Western languages. Yet when the country opened itself up a few years ago, the change was signalled at once by signposting the capital's airport - in English. Barely noticed by English-speaking people, an enormous boom of learning English has developed all over the world, a boom that is not matched by a similar run on other languages. Not a small city in Brazil that does not boast at least two schools of English. Even in countries with strong cultural links to France the young want to learn English, not French. In Cambodia the French government suffered a painful experience when the young spurned the offers of the Alliance FranÃßaise, preferring instead to sign up with anyone who offered English courses, however dubious. In German-speaking Switzerland school children must learn French and in French-speaking Switzerland German. They do so for political reasons, the mutual intelligibility is seen as important in a multi-lingual country. The kids do not agree with their elders; surveys have shown that they would all very much prefer to learn English.
The French are rightly pained by this situation. Besides a certain amount of fashionability behind the English boom, there are solid economic and psychological forces at work. English is seen more and more widely as the language of world trade, of economic progress, of science and technology, the main window to the world and not just because of the Internet which of course it dominates.
French was, until a century ago, in a similar position to that occupied by English today. Nobody could pass for educated without the ability to speak French. However, French dominance was never so complete as its rival's is now for the simple reason that 100 years ago large parts of the world were not yet connected to rest as they are all today. In Mongolia it was sufficient to speak Mongolian, in Madagascar Malagasy could get you anywhere. Globalisation had not been heard of then.
French has suffered a decline in its world-wide influence above all when measured against English. It has more or less held its position against other major languages but against English, the situation is glum. French still has a base in many parts of Africa, although the position is crumbling as recent events in Rwanda and Zaire-Congo have shown. It also still enjoys considerable sympathy in Latin America where common Latin roots and a certain distaste for English-speaking gringos can still be found. International English is advancing there but it is still seen more as the language of the USA rather than as a politically neutral means of international communication. In Asia French has lost virtually all its ground to English, even in Vietnam where it is the nostalgic language of an older generation. French has a narrow base on which to built its claim as a world language: it is the majority language in France alone and a minority language in Canada, Belgium and Switzerland. The strength of French in international fields, especially diplomacy, is also slowly eroding away. Anybody who watches TV can see this erosion taking place before his or her very eyes: more and more international conferences replace French with English country tags on delegates' tables. In far away places, from Albania to Chechenia and Georgia - places where English is still very much a foreign language - demonstrators can be seen waving posters in English. They know what language to use to catch the international news media.
Despite a clear downward trend relative to English, French remains the world's second most influential language. Its prestige remains extremely high, not least thanks to the tireless efforts and the vast sums spent by the French government, but also by the pride taken in their language by practically all French people. In Hong Kong I once talked to a taxi driver and congratulated him on his excellent English. He said that he could not do without English in his job but that he now wanted to learn French even if he had little practical use for it. He wanted to learn it for its social prestige.
The number two position of French in the league table of the ten most influential languages is not so much endangered by the top language (which cannot be overtaken again in the foreseeable course of events) as by Spanish. Coming up quietly from behind it is spreading rapidly in the USA and may expand further afield yet. Latin America is no longer an economically depressing and often depressed area, no longer the backyard of the USA. With growing self-confidence, despite setbacks, Latin America will boost the value of Spanish (and with it that of its closely related Portuguese in Brazil) on the world's linguistic marketplace.
Russian has been held hostage by an ideology for 70 years and throughout the empire the language was imposed on subject people by brute force. The situation has changed dramatically since the early 1990s but Russian will take some time to recover any popularity outside Russia proper. For many years the newly independent parts of the former Soviet Union were busily shaking off Russian influence and trying to avoid the use of the Russian language. It turned out rather 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 confused and will take decades if not generations to settle down. One hesitates to hazard a guess but the chances are good that Russian will remain among the top ten languages.
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 characteristics and not historical or political forces may actually make a difference. German is a difficult language to learn, its three genders alone see to that, English is much easier initially. The chances are fairly even but my money would be on English as the eventual winner - but I would not bet a large amount.
8. The Top Ten seen together - with some runners up of all sizes
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Fig. 11. A hierarchy of lingua francas. |
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Fig. 12. Major historical lingua francas. |
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Fig. 13. Rise and fall of major languages: the historical dimension. |
Fig. 14. Systems of writing.
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Acknowledgments In gratitude to the editor of Language Monthly, Geoffrey Kingscott, for supporting and encouraging this article and for first publishing it in his journal.
Sources Most figures on languages are taken from Eric V. Gunnemark's Countries, People and Their Languages (a Geolinguistic Handbook), 1991, Gothenburg, Sweden. For cross-reference and back-up checks as well as for non-linguistic figures the following sources have been used: Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1985, Encyclpaedia Britannica Inc, Chicago,
USA Fig 6. is based on a table given in the Fischer Weltalamanach 1986, p. 910. For economic figures the Fischer Weltalmanach 1993 and the World Bank Atlas 1991 as well as UN and IMF publications have been major sources. |
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Last changed 16 May 2009
