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World Languages
Information on World Languages
How do you decide which language you want to learn? There are over 5000 living languages in the world today. Although they are all equal in principle, because they are adequate to serve the needs of the communities that use them, the spread of education and information technology, and the impact of economic globalization have significantly altered social and economic realities that shape communicative needs. This means that some "big" languages have taken on greater significance, while others are rapidly losing ground. According to one prominent linguist (Joseph 1995), between 20 and 80 percent of these languages, depending on the region, are "headed irrevocably toward extinction in the next thirty years." This is happening because the current younger generation of speakers of many languages is predominantly bilingual or multilingual in the home language and one or several regional or international languages. Younger people are adopting the use of "world languages" at an unprecedented rate, and leaving behind their native tongues. Like other language learners around the world, you may be concerned with the utility of the language you choose. After all, if language learning is a form of investment, people want to be reasonably certain that there will be some kind of return on that investment in the form of use value: they want to be able to use the language in interaction with other people. We have argued elsewhere in these pages that the value of language learning is not only utilitarian. You get a lot of benefits from the process of language learning itself, such as learning more about your native language, gaining insight into the ways cultures can vary, and becoming an expert language learner in the event that you need to learn a different foreign language in the future. Studying ANY foreign language will bring you these benefits. However, if you want to try to assess the probability of using your foreign language in interaction with others, you need to know which languages are used in what places and by how many people.
There are many widely shared opinions and folk notions about facts and trends in the use of languages. You may have heard statements like: "The whole world speaks English now," or sometimes: "Spanish is taking over parts of our country." The fact that statements like these can be partly contradictory suggests that they may not be based entirely on facts, but tend instead to reflect attitudes, biases and even fears.
It is not easy to summarize findings about the distribution of languages, as we will see below. However, to begin to address this problem is is more helpful to study facts than opinions, and it is also useful to look at the problem through a "world-wide" lens. The "world languages" perspective is partly about trying to figure out which major languages are used in what ways around the world.
A simple first question we might ask is: How many native speakers are there for each language? Estimates of the number of native speakers for the worlds "top twenty" languages are provided in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (2nd Edition, Edited by David Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The Atlas of Languages (Edited by B. Comrie, S. Matthews & M. Polanyi, New York: Facts on File, 1996).
The World's Top Twenty Languages: Number of Native Speakers (in millions)
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What is a native speaker? When we compare these figures, we find that although they are roughly similar, there are some important differences: The only language for which these two sources agree is Telugu (55 million native speakers). For all the others they do not present the same numbers, and sometimes the differences are striking. What happened, for example, to those 77 million natives of English in the Encyclopedia who do not appear in the Atlas?
The discrepancies in the figures point to the difficulty in establishing just what a "native speaker" is. The problem seems fairly straightforward in our midwestern American society, where a majority of people are still raised in one language that is used in most of the contexts they subsequently encounter in daily life. But this situation is not characteristic of all, or even most, societies around the world. More typically, people encounter multilingualism early in their lives, and develop competence in more than one language as a matter of course. If for example, children are raised in bi- or multilingual households, which language "counts" as their native language? If people learn a language at home in childhood, but do not have opportunities to use it later in the wider world of adulthood, does the childhood language still "count" as their native language? And what if children learn to speak one language at home, but must use a different language at school? How early must their learning of the school language begin in order to consider that language one of their "native" languages? How well must a person know the language in order tobe counted as a "native"? Clearly, it matters which criteria we choose in determining what a "native speaker" is. Different criteria yield different results.
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Why do we study the languages we do? These figures also suggest a few provocative questions about language study in the United States. If Chinese, Hindi and Arabic are among the top five languages in terms of number of native speakers, why don't more Americans study those languages? If there are 50 million more speakers of Bengali than French, how come there are so many courses in French and hardly any courses in Bengali? There are all these languages among the top twenty that I've never even heard of. WHY? In part, these questions can be answered by looking to the traditions of language instruction in the US and the history of investments our country has made in foreign language instruction focusing mainly on European languages (Spanish, German and French). These traditions do need to be broken in order to make language study by Americans more realistic and enhance its pragmatic impact through the study of "Less Commonly Taught Languages" (LCTLs). Here again, however, the problem is more complex than it first appears. To understand the importance of particular languages in the world we need to know not only how many native speakers they have, but also the answers to questions like:
How widespread is the use of the language? Is it spoken in one country? Two? Many countries?
How many people who are not native speakers routinely use the language, and in what situations?
Is the language used for international communication?
Does it enjoy prestige?
How many people around the world express their desire to know the language by studying it (even if they don't develop advanced competence)?
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Languages and nations The Ethnologic data base from the Summer Institute of Linguistics provides information by country about where the world's languages are used. According to Ethnologic, the top languages (by number of native speakers, excluding English) have the status of "official" or "national" language in the following countries:
Language Countries
When we look at the problem from this angle, we see that some languages appear to be more widely distributed than others. Spanish (20 countries) and French (31 counries) and Portuguese (7 countires) have a significant presence in the former colonies of Spain, France and Portugal on more than one continent. Standard Arabic (20 countires) enjoys widespread influence in the Middle East. Within Europe, German is a language of major importance: representing significant economic and cultural power, German also has a larger number of native speakers within Europe than any other European language (source: Lodge 1997). However, outside Europe, there are no officially German-speaking countries. Chinese, Japanese and Russian are major languages in the sense that they have many native speakers and the countries where they are used are, or have been, world powers economically. But outside of China, Japan and Russia they have no official status and few native speakers. Hindi, Bengali, Javanese and Korean also have many native speakers, but their use is restricted to smaller geographic areas and to countries that are poorer and have historically had less world-wide economic and cultural influence than the other countries represented here. Seen from this vantage point, a rationale for Americans' traditional focus on the languages of Europe begin to take shape. However, once again, there is more here than meets the eye, because we also need to understand what it means when a language has official status.
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Official language: Case studies What is a "French-speaking country"? In the Republic of Haiti, French is the national language. According to the Ethnologue data base, French is actually used by only 5% of Haitians, or 400,000 second-language speakers out of a total population of 7,000,000. The native language of the entire population is Haitian Creole, a language with a distinct grammar and vocabulary formed at the time of colonization through contact between European settlers and the diverse population of enslaved Africans. Although Haitian Creole has legal and educational status in Haiti, it has less social status than standard French, which is used exclusively by the educated elite minority.
For Mali, another "French-speaking country," Ethnologue lists 31 different language groups, of which the most important are Bambara (2,700,000 speakers) and Malinké (668,000 speakers). Of the total population of 10,878,000 people, 9,000 are speakers of the official language, French. In Mali, French is also the language of the educated minority, serving as a medium of communication between people of different native language backgrounds.
Switzerland has 4 official languages, French, German, Italian and Romanch distributed in language-dominant regions. French and German are the most important. German speakers are in the majority, with 72% of the population using a local variety of Swiss German every day. Although Swiss German is not intelligible with Standard German because it is so different, most speakers of Swiss German are bilingual in Standard and Swiss German. 33% of the population, residing in the French-speaking regions near France, speaks French every day.
French is the official language of France, and is used in everyday communication, in education, and in administration by the entire population. French has gradually assimilated most of the regional languages that were still in use at the turn of the century (such as Breton, Occitan, Provencal, Corsican), but there are still non-French speaking communities in the regions relatively distant from Paris, and attempts at language revival are taking place in areas where there is widespread memory of the regional languages.
As these cases illustrate, "a French-speaking country" can mean a lot of different things. If a language is official, this does not mean that it is spoken by everyone in the country. The official language may be spoken only by those people who are fortunate enough to have access to education, or it may have been selected as a neutral option when it is too difficult for a nation to select one from among many different native languages that may be felt to be in competition for official recognition. The language may be official and used by all social classes, but spoken only in certain regions of the country. Even in a clear-cut case such as that of France, the dominance of the official language can still be a matter of debate in certain places. Still, if you know French, you will be able to communicate with some people in the countries where French has official status, and with many other non-native speakers from the many countries where French is among the preferred foreign languages for study.
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Functions of language in society Linguists have categories for sorting out the differences between official language and the other uses of languages in particular societies. These categories help to analyze the complex question of who uses which language for what purposes. Although the categories can sometimes overlap, and particular languages are often used in more than one way, we can classify language use in general as follows:
Official languages are so designated by states, and are used for all official governmental or administrative functions, either at the national, the regional or the local level. Usually, by declaring a language "official" a state promises to guarantee the possibility of its use by citizens in their interactions with the government, public services and the administration. Many states have more than one official language, reflecting the presence of more than one significant language group in the population.
Vernacular languages are the mother tongues of all or part of a country's population, used for everyday communication, in homes, among family members and friends in informal interaction. In countries like France or Britain, the official language is also the vernacular for most people, but this is not the case throughout the world, especially in developing nations.
Vehicular languages are used for non-official communication between members of different language groups. The language may or may not be the native language of one of these groups. Ball (1997) explains it like this: "It could be used, for instance, in conversations between customers and stall-holders in a market in an African town that is a regional centre. If French-speaking and German-speaking Swiss communicate in English, they are using it as a vehicular language" (p. 8). (One alternative term for vehicular languages is "lingua franca," reflecting the widespread use of French for this function in the past.)
Languages which have special status in a society do not have any of the above functions, but may be widely admired and/ or studied, or have had a special relationship to the society in the past. In the countries of North Africa, for example, even after decolonization from France, French is in widespread use among the educated public for intellectual or cultural reasons, even though it may have no official function and the users of French may share a native language, such as Arabic.
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- What is a native speaker?
- Why do we study the languages we do?
- Languages and nations
- Official language: Cases studies
- Functions of language in society
How do you decide which language you want to learn? There are over 5000 living languages in the world today. Although they are all equal in principle, because they are adequate to serve the needs of the communities that use them, the spread of education and information technology, and the impact of economic globalization have significantly altered social and economic realities that shape communicative needs. This means that some "big" languages have taken on greater significance, while others are rapidly losing ground. According to one prominent linguist (Joseph 1995), between 20 and 80 percent of these languages, depending on the region, are "headed irrevocably toward extinction in the next thirty years." This is happening because the current younger generation of speakers of many languages is predominantly bilingual or multilingual in the home language and one or several regional or international languages. Younger people are adopting the use of "world languages" at an unprecedented rate, and leaving behind their native tongues. Like other language learners around the world, you may be concerned with the utility of the language you choose. After all, if language learning is a form of investment, people want to be reasonably certain that there will be some kind of return on that investment in the form of use value: they want to be able to use the language in interaction with other people. We have argued elsewhere in these pages that the value of language learning is not only utilitarian. You get a lot of benefits from the process of language learning itself, such as learning more about your native language, gaining insight into the ways cultures can vary, and becoming an expert language learner in the event that you need to learn a different foreign language in the future. Studying ANY foreign language will bring you these benefits. However, if you want to try to assess the probability of using your foreign language in interaction with others, you need to know which languages are used in what places and by how many people.
There are many widely shared opinions and folk notions about facts and trends in the use of languages. You may have heard statements like: "The whole world speaks English now," or sometimes: "Spanish is taking over parts of our country." The fact that statements like these can be partly contradictory suggests that they may not be based entirely on facts, but tend instead to reflect attitudes, biases and even fears.
It is not easy to summarize findings about the distribution of languages, as we will see below. However, to begin to address this problem is is more helpful to study facts than opinions, and it is also useful to look at the problem through a "world-wide" lens. The "world languages" perspective is partly about trying to figure out which major languages are used in what ways around the world.
A simple first question we might ask is: How many native speakers are there for each language? Estimates of the number of native speakers for the worlds "top twenty" languages are provided in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (2nd Edition, Edited by David Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The Atlas of Languages (Edited by B. Comrie, S. Matthews & M. Polanyi, New York: Facts on File, 1996).
The World's Top Twenty Languages: Number of Native Speakers (in millions)
| Language/ Source | Cambridge Encyclopedia | Atlas of Languages |
| Chinese | All Chinese 1071/ Mandarin 726 | 1000 |
| English | 427 | 350 |
| Spanish | 266 | 250 |
| Hindi | 182 | 200 |
| Arabic | 181 | 150 |
| Bengali | 162 | 150 |
| Russian | 158 | 150 |
| Portuguese | 165 | 135 |
| Japanese | 124 | 120 |
| German | 121 | 100 |
| French | 116 | 70 |
| Punjabi | 60 | 70 |
| Javanese | 75 | 65 |
| Bihari | not available | 65 |
| Italian | 65 | 60 |
| Korean | 66 | 60 |
| Telugu | 55 | 55 |
| Tamil | 49 | 55 |
| Marathi | 58 | 50 |
| Vietnamese | 57 | 50 |
What is a native speaker? When we compare these figures, we find that although they are roughly similar, there are some important differences: The only language for which these two sources agree is Telugu (55 million native speakers). For all the others they do not present the same numbers, and sometimes the differences are striking. What happened, for example, to those 77 million natives of English in the Encyclopedia who do not appear in the Atlas?
The discrepancies in the figures point to the difficulty in establishing just what a "native speaker" is. The problem seems fairly straightforward in our midwestern American society, where a majority of people are still raised in one language that is used in most of the contexts they subsequently encounter in daily life. But this situation is not characteristic of all, or even most, societies around the world. More typically, people encounter multilingualism early in their lives, and develop competence in more than one language as a matter of course. If for example, children are raised in bi- or multilingual households, which language "counts" as their native language? If people learn a language at home in childhood, but do not have opportunities to use it later in the wider world of adulthood, does the childhood language still "count" as their native language? And what if children learn to speak one language at home, but must use a different language at school? How early must their learning of the school language begin in order to consider that language one of their "native" languages? How well must a person know the language in order tobe counted as a "native"? Clearly, it matters which criteria we choose in determining what a "native speaker" is. Different criteria yield different results.
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Why do we study the languages we do? These figures also suggest a few provocative questions about language study in the United States. If Chinese, Hindi and Arabic are among the top five languages in terms of number of native speakers, why don't more Americans study those languages? If there are 50 million more speakers of Bengali than French, how come there are so many courses in French and hardly any courses in Bengali? There are all these languages among the top twenty that I've never even heard of. WHY? In part, these questions can be answered by looking to the traditions of language instruction in the US and the history of investments our country has made in foreign language instruction focusing mainly on European languages (Spanish, German and French). These traditions do need to be broken in order to make language study by Americans more realistic and enhance its pragmatic impact through the study of "Less Commonly Taught Languages" (LCTLs). Here again, however, the problem is more complex than it first appears. To understand the importance of particular languages in the world we need to know not only how many native speakers they have, but also the answers to questions like:
How widespread is the use of the language? Is it spoken in one country? Two? Many countries?
How many people who are not native speakers routinely use the language, and in what situations?
Is the language used for international communication?
Does it enjoy prestige?
How many people around the world express their desire to know the language by studying it (even if they don't develop advanced competence)?
back to top
Languages and nations The Ethnologic data base from the Summer Institute of Linguistics provides information by country about where the world's languages are used. According to Ethnologic, the top languages (by number of native speakers, excluding English) have the status of "official" or "national" language in the following countries:
Language Countries
| Chinese | China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan |
| Spanish | Equatorial Guinea, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uraguay, Venezuela, Spain |
| Hindi | India |
| Arabic | Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen |
| Bengali | Bangladesh, India, Singapore |
| Russian | Russia |
| Portuguese | Angola, Brazil, CapeVerde Islands, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tome e Príncipe |
| Japanese | Japan |
| German | Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg |
| French | France (including Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Pierre et Miquelon, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Vanatu, Wallis and Futuna, French Guiana), Andorra, Belgium, Canada, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros Islands, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Italy (Aosta Valley), Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mayotte, Monaco, Niger, Reunion, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Switzerland, Togo, Zaire |
| Javanese | Indonesia, Java, Bali |
| Korean | North Korea, South Korea |
When we look at the problem from this angle, we see that some languages appear to be more widely distributed than others. Spanish (20 countries) and French (31 counries) and Portuguese (7 countires) have a significant presence in the former colonies of Spain, France and Portugal on more than one continent. Standard Arabic (20 countires) enjoys widespread influence in the Middle East. Within Europe, German is a language of major importance: representing significant economic and cultural power, German also has a larger number of native speakers within Europe than any other European language (source: Lodge 1997). However, outside Europe, there are no officially German-speaking countries. Chinese, Japanese and Russian are major languages in the sense that they have many native speakers and the countries where they are used are, or have been, world powers economically. But outside of China, Japan and Russia they have no official status and few native speakers. Hindi, Bengali, Javanese and Korean also have many native speakers, but their use is restricted to smaller geographic areas and to countries that are poorer and have historically had less world-wide economic and cultural influence than the other countries represented here. Seen from this vantage point, a rationale for Americans' traditional focus on the languages of Europe begin to take shape. However, once again, there is more here than meets the eye, because we also need to understand what it means when a language has official status.
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Official language: Case studies What is a "French-speaking country"? In the Republic of Haiti, French is the national language. According to the Ethnologue data base, French is actually used by only 5% of Haitians, or 400,000 second-language speakers out of a total population of 7,000,000. The native language of the entire population is Haitian Creole, a language with a distinct grammar and vocabulary formed at the time of colonization through contact between European settlers and the diverse population of enslaved Africans. Although Haitian Creole has legal and educational status in Haiti, it has less social status than standard French, which is used exclusively by the educated elite minority.
For Mali, another "French-speaking country," Ethnologue lists 31 different language groups, of which the most important are Bambara (2,700,000 speakers) and Malinké (668,000 speakers). Of the total population of 10,878,000 people, 9,000 are speakers of the official language, French. In Mali, French is also the language of the educated minority, serving as a medium of communication between people of different native language backgrounds.
Switzerland has 4 official languages, French, German, Italian and Romanch distributed in language-dominant regions. French and German are the most important. German speakers are in the majority, with 72% of the population using a local variety of Swiss German every day. Although Swiss German is not intelligible with Standard German because it is so different, most speakers of Swiss German are bilingual in Standard and Swiss German. 33% of the population, residing in the French-speaking regions near France, speaks French every day.
French is the official language of France, and is used in everyday communication, in education, and in administration by the entire population. French has gradually assimilated most of the regional languages that were still in use at the turn of the century (such as Breton, Occitan, Provencal, Corsican), but there are still non-French speaking communities in the regions relatively distant from Paris, and attempts at language revival are taking place in areas where there is widespread memory of the regional languages.
As these cases illustrate, "a French-speaking country" can mean a lot of different things. If a language is official, this does not mean that it is spoken by everyone in the country. The official language may be spoken only by those people who are fortunate enough to have access to education, or it may have been selected as a neutral option when it is too difficult for a nation to select one from among many different native languages that may be felt to be in competition for official recognition. The language may be official and used by all social classes, but spoken only in certain regions of the country. Even in a clear-cut case such as that of France, the dominance of the official language can still be a matter of debate in certain places. Still, if you know French, you will be able to communicate with some people in the countries where French has official status, and with many other non-native speakers from the many countries where French is among the preferred foreign languages for study.
back to top
Functions of language in society Linguists have categories for sorting out the differences between official language and the other uses of languages in particular societies. These categories help to analyze the complex question of who uses which language for what purposes. Although the categories can sometimes overlap, and particular languages are often used in more than one way, we can classify language use in general as follows:
Official languages are so designated by states, and are used for all official governmental or administrative functions, either at the national, the regional or the local level. Usually, by declaring a language "official" a state promises to guarantee the possibility of its use by citizens in their interactions with the government, public services and the administration. Many states have more than one official language, reflecting the presence of more than one significant language group in the population.
Vernacular languages are the mother tongues of all or part of a country's population, used for everyday communication, in homes, among family members and friends in informal interaction. In countries like France or Britain, the official language is also the vernacular for most people, but this is not the case throughout the world, especially in developing nations.
Vehicular languages are used for non-official communication between members of different language groups. The language may or may not be the native language of one of these groups. Ball (1997) explains it like this: "It could be used, for instance, in conversations between customers and stall-holders in a market in an African town that is a regional centre. If French-speaking and German-speaking Swiss communicate in English, they are using it as a vehicular language" (p. 8). (One alternative term for vehicular languages is "lingua franca," reflecting the widespread use of French for this function in the past.)
Languages which have special status in a society do not have any of the above functions, but may be widely admired and/ or studied, or have had a special relationship to the society in the past. In the countries of North Africa, for example, even after decolonization from France, French is in widespread use among the educated public for intellectual or cultural reasons, even though it may have no official function and the users of French may share a native language, such as Arabic.
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