this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
47 points (94.3% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
790 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
French and Arabic are the second and third most spoken language in number of countries. Then there is the obvious Mandarin which is spoken in most of China with around a billion locutors
I keep debating Mandarin but my issue is how the language is tied tightly to China. Helpful if I decide to explore China in depth but seemingly less so if I want to "get by" in a large number of countries. If I had an ability to learn languages quickly, I would probably learn French, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi, but I think I am already pushing my limits.
Yeah, that's the thing: "which language is spoken by the most people" is an easy question to answer, but "which language (or combination of languages) lets me communicate well enough to get by in the most places" is much harder because the statistics aren't necessarily collected in a way that lend themselves to that kind of analysis.
For example, Hindi is spoken by a whole bunch of people, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those people also speak English, so if you already know English you don't actually need to learn it.
Yeah, that's the gist of the question.