There is little risk of controversy by saying that today English is a more influential language in the world than Yanomami. To a child's question: why should this be so, the well-informed parental answer would be that English has hundreds of millions of speakers while Yanomami could hardly muster 16,000. Really difficult descendants and Well-informed people could then point out that in this case, Chinese would be the most important language in the world. At this point, the experienced parent would send the kid to bother someone else. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Every language, including Yanomami, is the most important language in the world “to its speakers.” Rather than “important”, we will therefore use the word “influential” in its place here. Chinese is a very influential language, no doubt, but is it more so than English? Clearly no. The number of speakers is relevant but entirely insufficient for a meaningful ranking of languages ​​in order of current global influence, with emphasis on the word "global". There are many other factors to take into account and this is what we will attempt to do in what follows. Classifying the world's major current languages ​​is not just an idle pastime. The world is moving 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 ​​appear and evolve in relation to each other is important. Like the weather, many developments only make sense when considering the global situation, not just local elements. 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, it changes one's attitudes and worldview in many ways. To what extent, in what form and with what depth these changes actually manifest themselves in the individual learner depends on many factors, from the circumstances that led to the decision to learn the foreign language, from character, intelligence, education and origin of the learner. 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 completely different ways alone broadens many mental horizons. But not all. There are polyglot fanatics and it would be naive to claim that knowledge of a foreign language necessarily reduces aggressiveness and the risk of war. It helps if other conditions are met, but it takes more than language skills to achieve this. The leaders of the former Yugoslavia, who express murderous sentiments in almost perfect English, sufficiently warn against exaggerated hopes in this regard. No one is more aware of the long-term influence that knowing another language can have on its learners. . No other language is promoted so aggressively in the world. The French understand well that their language is the main vector of French civilization. Speakers of most other major languages ​​think along the same lines. However, two major civilizations, the Chinese and to a lesser extent the Japanese, actually adopt an opposite attitude. They consider their civilizations so obviously superior that imposing their language on foreigners really did them too much honor. Theyalso tend to think that their languages ​​are far too complex for clumsy foreigners to master, although they are far too polite to say this openly. Languages ​​expand and contract due to social, cultural, military, scientific, technological, organizational and other factors. strengths and weaknesses of their stakeholders. What is today called, overly simplistically and geographically incorrectly, "the West" dominates the world in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Although this is often denied for reasons of self-respect, even China, however reserved, has adopted an ideology of Western origin for half a century. With the introduction of Western technologies, Western ideas quietly take hold, as do Western attitudes and languages. The Japanese and Koreans have demonstrated with enormous success that these effects can be absorbed without abandoning their cultural identity. Not all cultures and languages ​​share the inherent strengths of these two elements. The most fragile cultures may feel seriously threatened by Westernization, but if they wish to participate in the ongoing industrialization of the world, they have little choice but to protest. 2 shows that when it comes to languages, “The West” refers first and foremost to the English language, followed only after a fairly significant gap by French and Spanish. It cannot be emphasized enough that it is not inherent superiority, nor linguistic, but historical factors that have placed English, French and Spanish where they are today. Whatever historical factors pushed English to first place, they are still at work and seem set to continue. It is worth reflecting on any triumphalist impulse that, by 100 AD, seemed destined to dominate its part of the world forever. Economic data is easy to collect compared to population data, not to mention languages. The temptation to falsify the figures is not less either. Few national censuses pay as much attention to language and those that do are too often disrupted for political reasons. Governments are notorious for manipulating numbers until they are “right.” Minorities and unpopular languages ​​are set to disappear or become insignificant while the numbers of ruling groups are inflated. Sometimes even the strongest linguistic classifications are swept aside, 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 part 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 leaders and may be violently suspicious of government agents who ask too many questions, or even none at all. Many Westerners, especially academics working in the protected institutions of established democracies, tend to have a little difficulty grasping this reality. In a third world country which will remain anonymous because it is not the only culprit, it is common for companies to have three sets of books. One for the government, a second for the government tax inspector to estimate the amount of bribe he can demand for official acceptance of the first set of books, and a third set showing the figures real to the owners. It is aboutof course from the first series of figures entering government statistics. Global statistics add up not only the figures provided by different countries, but also all the falsifications provided with them. Another problem is the speed with which census figures are processed and published. Some computerized and technologically advanced countries can publish quickly, but the majority take years before even preliminary figures are released and by the time they do, they are long out of date. In very large and densely populated countries like India and China, the scale and diversity of the phenomena are staggering. The Indian census is indeed one of the statistical marvels of this world. Even the best censuses in the most well-organized countries can only ask a few simple questions about languages ​​and must depend on the self-assessment and honesty of the citizens surveyed. What exactly does it mean to “know” a language? The spectrum extends from Oxford English professor to street vendor in a Bangkok tourist area who has a few dozen English words and no grammar to rub shoulders with. The teacher and the seller make a living from their knowledge of the English language. If asked in a census, both could honestly claim to “know” English. If a linguist reports that language X uses grammatical feature Y, we can go into the field and verify the fact. No one can verify statistical facts alone. They are like the two sexes in humans, one must accept the other as they are, with all their faults. Why discuss in such detail the problems of census takers and the reliability of their figures? Before looking at the graphs in this article, it is important to understand how unreliable global figures in general, and particularly those relating to languages, are. They all constitute a veritable patchwork of local, regional and national figures brought together under very different conditions and at different times, processed through many stages by people with different levels of education, cultural backgrounds, loyalties, goals and very different ideas about accuracy, not to say competence. . Of course, statisticians are aware of all this and more, as are those who compile official UN statistics, but they are reluctant to address this aspect of their work. UNESCO magically projects a surreal pseudo-precision to the nearest hundred speakers: it claims that there are 285,077,900 primary speakers of Russian and 1,077,548,100 of Chinese. Figure 3 shows how global estimates can actually differ if one removes the rationalization that is usually done by international agencies. English has an uncertainty well over 150,000,000. Churchill's too-oft-quoted quote regarding statistics comes to mind, but I will resist the temptation. What keeps the published figures from being completely useless (and turning this article into a complete waste of valuable paper) is the fact that all major languages ​​contain roughly similar margins of uncertainty. In other words, they can always be compared and ranked with a certain degree of confidence. The figures on which this article is based are taken from reference works a few years old now and collected a few years even earlier. Given everything that has been said here so far, the reader will understand that this matters little. The absolute numbers have increased since then, but this will not affect the ranking of the ten most influential languages. If the number of main speakers of a languageis very uncertain, the number of secondary speakers is only a pure hypothesis. I have included Figure 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 main speakers, French has the most secondary speakers and Chinese the fewest. Foreign students constitute a tiny minority but an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. They generally belong to the most educated social strata of their own country. As future political, economic, social and cultural leaders, they play a major role in spreading the acceptability and social prestige of a foreign language. Despite the lack of even semi-reliable data on the number of secondary speakers, their number is a very important factor. It is an important factor in establishing the degree of influence exerted by a major language that we must briefly discuss at least three groups of them. Each brings a different weight to the scale and all three would have to be treated differently in any proper statistical analysis - if the numbers were reliable enough for any of them. Immigrants are people who have moved to another country to live. They often learn the language of the host country randomly, usually while trying to hold 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 ease. Different nationalities and language groups differ greatly in the way they adapt to their new homeland. Some groups quickly dissolve into the host population, leaving virtually no trace after a few generations, while others cling to their ancestral tradition and language for many generations, only using the host language. as for their relations with the outside world. In some countries, the languages ​​of immigrants may occupy an important place in the statistics, but their influence on the host language is generally weak. For example, there are significant Chinese, Korean, Pakistani and Indian immigrant communities in Canada and the United States. They speak their own language at home but use English for their 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 increasingly spoken in the United States, and controversies surrounding its use in American schools show how influential it has become. Only time will tell if it will succeed in establishing itself as a second language alongside English in the United States. The chances of this happening seem good. National minorities constitute yet another group of speakers of “foreign” languages, although the term “foreign” is inappropriate here. Members of linguistic minorities who do not speak the majority language often find their career, professional, social and general prospects reduced or even completely paralyzed. The influence of this type of minority languages ​​on the majority language is generally small, but it can accumulate over centuries. All major languages ​​are growing today, both in influence and in number of speakers. The higher a language ranks, the faster its growth. Besides the natural increase in population everywhere, this growth comes at the expense of smaller local languages. Hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller languages ​​are being phased out. The speakers of somelanguages ​​have seen their own language's influence curbed by one of the ten largest languages ​​and they report fear of threatening domination - while at the same time their language in turn drives smaller local languages towards extinction. Few notice the irony of this situation and complaints about linguistic and cultural expansionism are loud. Expansionism is what others do to you, what you cannot do to them, but would do if you could. It is no coincidence that of the world's ten major languages, only two do not function as lingua francas. The two exceptions are Chinese and Japanese; their difficult, personalized writing systems and the fact that both are used by essentially monoglot societies in very limited or wide geographic areas have 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, although often with a marked lack of enthusiasm, is used willy-nilly as a lingua franca. Looking at the languages ​​shown in Figure 2, we can see that the higher a language rises in the rankings, the more important it is as a lingua franca in its region. In relative terms, the picture among the top ten languages ​​is not static. but a slow and steady trend. Figure 13 shows in a very general way the dynamics of summit life over the last 500 years. Now let's look at 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 become the first truly global lingua franca. International English has become independent of any English-speaking country, even the United States. A Korean manufacturer meeting the Brazilian buyer of a Swiss-based conglomerate in an Athens hotel will not only negotiate but also order a dinner from his room service in English. There may not be a single English speaker in the hotel, but all the non-locals staying there communicate with each other in English - of course. From a certain level, in business, sport, politics and many other fields, knowledge of English has no longer become a question of prestige but a necessity. The level at which this happens is getting lower and lower. In science and technology, the influence of English is total. With increasing computing sophistication, it is becoming easier to display even the most complex languages ​​and scripts on screen, but this does not change the big picture. The Chinese trader, scientist or industrialist who wishes to chat with his foreign contacts is not much helped by Chinese characters, even the most carefully presented on his screen. He must say it in English to his non-Chinese contacts. It remains an open question whether there is room for more than one global lingua franca. I doubt it and, it seems, the famous "market". There is considerable interest in learning English almost everywhere in the world. Geography and history have until recently made Mongolia one of the most landlocked and isolated countries in the world, isolated in particular from the West and Western languages. Yet when the country opened up a few years ago, the change was immediately signaled by English signage at the capital's airport. Barely noticed by English speakers, a huge boom in English learning has developed around the world, a boom that has no equivalent in other languages. Thisisn't a small town in Brazil that doesn't have at least two English schools. Even in countries with strong cultural ties to France, young people want to learn English and not French. In Cambodia, the French government had a painful experience when young people rejected offers from the Alliance Française, preferring to register with anyone who offered English lessons, no matter how dubious. In German-speaking Switzerland, schoolchildren must learn French and in French-speaking Switzerland, German. They do this for political reasons, as mutual intelligibility is considered important in a multilingual country. Children do not agree with their elders; surveys have shown that they would all much prefer to learn English. The French are, rightly, saddened by this situation. In addition to a certain fashion at the origin of the English boom, solid economic and psychological forces are at work. English is increasingly widely seen as the language of global commerce, economic progress, science and technology, the main window on the world and not just because of the Internet which it dominates of course. French was, until a century ago, in a situation similar to that of English. No one can be considered educated without knowing how to speak French. However, French domination has never been as total as that of its rival is today 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 enough to speak Mongolian, in Madagascar, Malagasy could take you anywhere. We had not yet heard of globalization at the time. French has seen its global influence decline, especially compared to English. It has more or less held its position against other major languages, but compared to English, the situation is gloomy. France still has a base in many parts of Africa, even if its position is collapsing as recent events in Rwanda and Zaire-Congo have shown. He also still enjoys considerable sympathy in Latin America, where there are still common Latin roots and a certain distaste for English-speaking gringos. International English is making progress there, but it is still considered more as the language of the United States than as a politically neutral means of international communication. In Asia, French has lost almost all its ground to English, even in Vietnam where it is the nostalgic language of an older generation. French has a narrow basis on which to base its claim as a world language: it is the majority language in France alone and a minority language in Canada, Belgium and Switzerland. France's strength in international fields, particularly diplomatic ones, is also slowly eroding. Anyone watching television can see this erosion before their eyes: more and more international conferences are replacing French with English on the delegates' tables. In distant countries, from Albania to Chechnya and Georgia, where English is still present. a foreign language - demonstrators can be seen holding up posters in English. They know which language to use to capture international information. Despite a clear downward trend compared to English, French remains the second most influential language in the world. high, in particular thanks to the tireless efforts and considerable sums spent by the French government, but also to the pride that almost all French people take in their language. In Hong Kong, I once spoke to a taxi driver and complimented him on his excellent work. English He said he couldn't do without English in his work but now wanted to learnFrench even if it had little practical use. He wanted to learn it for his social prestige. The second place of French in the world. The ranking of the ten most influential languages ​​is not so much threatened by the dominant language (which will no longer be able to be overtaken in the foreseeable course of events) as by Spanish. Appearing discreetly from behind, it is spreading quickly in the United States and could spread even further. Latin America is no longer an economically depressed and often depressed region, it is no longer the backyard of the United States. With growing self-confidence, despite setbacks, Latin America will increase the value of Spanish (and with it that of its close relative, Brazilian Portuguese) in the global linguistic market. Russian has been held hostage by an ideology for 70 years and throughout the world. In this empire, language was imposed on subjugated peoples by brutal force. The situation has changed dramatically since the early 1990s, but it will take some time for Russia to regain popularity outside Russia proper. For many years, the newly independent regions of the former Soviet Union worked to rid themselves of Russian influence and avoid the use of the Russian language. This 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 it will take decades, even generations, to stabilize. We hesitate to speculate, but there is a good chance that Russia will remain among the top ten languages. Arabic is the only language, apart from English and French, that is used in an international “domain”. It is the language of Islam and as such used in countless Koranic schools between Morocco and Indonesia. It is also the only major 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. This is a situation in which linguistic characteristics and not historical or political forces can really make a difference. German is a difficult language to learn, its three genres take care of it, English is much easier at the beginning. The odds are pretty even, but my money would be on English as the eventual winner – but I wouldn't bet a large amount. Chinese is a language whose speakers are visibly disinterested in spreading its use outside their own people. Although Chinese is not really one but several languages ​​linked by a common script, we will ignore these finer distinctions here and call all languages ​​(generally and incorrectly called dialects) Chinese. It is a principle of the language industry that to penetrate a market, you must know your language. This can 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 do not appreciate it when he succeeds. Telling the Chinese that their language was terribly difficult and practically impossible to learn cheers them up all day. Everyone can feel proud of having mastered something that is too complex for most others. The Chinese have elevated this feeling to the rank of national art. A foreigner who speaks or (even worse) writes excellent Chinese is viewed with grave suspicion. Foreign visitors to China, diplomats and businessmen alike, are known to claim knowledge of.