Let's talk about ten most popular spoken languages. Let's start from statistics. This is only estimation, but we can base on it in this article. After...
Let's talk about ten most popular spoken languages. Let's start from statistics. This is only estimation, but we can base on it in this article. After that I will explain how knowing the most popular languages affects to our life.
1. Mandarin (Chinese) - 845 million people use it2. Spanish - 329 million3. English - 328 million4. Arabic - 221 million5. Hindi - 182 million6. Bengali - 181 million7. Portuguese - 178 million8. Russian - 144 million9. Japanese - 122 million10. German - 90 million
Okay, so, are you shocked? Or it was predictable? In my opinion top of the list (Chinese, Spanish and English) was obvious, that every one could guess it. There was a survey relied on American pedestrians thoughts. Interviewer asked 500 people about language popularity and their answer was accurate in top 3 languages. There was some inaccuracy in bottom of the list. It turned out that they didn't know that Japanese or Russian language has even 100 million native speakers.
What gives us that knowledge about language popularity? What can we do with it? It depends on our branch. I am a keen language learner and translator (My specialisation is translations from English to Polish because Polish is my native language) so I love to get to know new languages. Knowing that list gives me an opportunity to learn languages which are the most popular in the world, so I can become a translator from this language and I can earn more money eventually.
How can it help you? e.g. you are a businessman and you run a company which trades on international market. Now you know there to expand. Use it. You will definitely find some advantages of this knowledge even if your branch is different. You just have to think about it.
