Recent numbers put Arabic at around 315 million native speakers. Plus, this is the language that gave us shampoo, jungle, jodhpurs and bungalow — what’s not to love? Let’s start with one that most of us can agree on, the language of Dante, da Vinci and Pavarotti. Welsh has shown formidable strength against the sometimes unstoppable tide of English, even though it is spoken natively only on the island that English came from. Spanish is the most spoken language in the world after English. More troubling is the fact that what we refer to simply as “Chinese” is actually a whole family of languages conveniently lumped into a single category. Find out more The QS World University Rankings by Subject are based upon academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact (click here to read the full methodology). Cherokee is the native language of the Cherokee people, who are indigenous to the south-eastern part of North America. As with Arabic, Chinese calligraphy has always been highly prized as an art form. Spanish has more native speakers in the world than English, making it the best language to learn when travelling. This means that reading and writing in Spanish is a straightforward task.With only ten vowel and diphthong sounds (English has 20), and no unfamiliar phon… In fact, the difference is so great that the world's most spoken language has over one billion speakers while some of the world's least spoken languages are down to only a handful. It is not only the most widely spoken language in the world but also the official tongue of China, one of the world’s most influential economic centers. Learning Spanish will enhance your travel experience and allow you to open up to locals, plus it isn’t a hard second language to learn. With roughly 153 million native speakers, Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world. The top 10 best languages you should learn in 2021! Italian has long been known as one of the foremost languages in the world of art, opera and, of course, romance – even the spoken version of it sounds like a song to non-native speakers. Arabic also has an impressive body of poetry, all of which puts the aural beauty of the language on display. If that isn’t a form of beauty, what is? The language bears a close resemblance with Hindi, and is associated with the Muslims. What About Second (L2) Languages? Which Languages Are Best for Future Business Opportunities? Wales is now officially a bilingual society. Speaking: Very Easy Grammar: Very Easy Writing: Easy Overall: Very Easy As English speakers, we can be thankful that Spanish pronunciations are one of the easiest to learn. Of course, there’s a lot more to Mandarin than a good business opportunity. The English language is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with over 360 million native speakers and many more who speak English as a second language. Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world—spoken in some form by 1.2 billion people—so it only makes sense to include it on this list. If you’re reading this article, you may be one of the 379 million-odd native English speakers, or one of the 753 million people who speak it as a second language. For some, English is still synonymous with opportunity and a better quality of life. The following table contains the top 100 languages by estimated number of native speakers in the 2007 edition of the Swedish encyclopedia Nationalencyklopedin.As census methods in different countries vary to a considerable extent, and given that some countries do not record language in their censuses, any list of languages by native speakers, or total speakers, is effectively based on estimates. According to Nasdaq, the world’s fastest-growing economy is Guyana, with a growth rate of 16.3% projected for 2018-2021. As the liturgical language of Islam, Arabic calligraphy has always been a highly venerated form of religious art. You might be surprised. There is something really wonderful about Czech, the westernmost branch of the Slavic language family. It has also proven itself to be literally worth fighting for: when the state required that all people use Urdu for their studies and throughout their lives, a number of students lost their lives in protesting for the right to use Bengali. Around the turn of the first millennium, it was developing as a Germanic language, and then the Normans invaded, bringing their language with them and affecting what was then Old English. The relative ease with which English can be picked up (especially compared with Chinese) and the pervasive soft power of US culture means that English will continue to dominate the world stage for the foreseeable future. FIND OUT MORE. It is one of the best programming language to learn which can work smoothly with other languages and can be used in a huge variety of applications. Arabic’s most beautiful aspect may be its alphabet, and the incredible calligraphy that has developed over centuries. Top ranked C is closely followed by Java in TIOBE by 1.35%. Did you know? But they’re slowly taking their revenge, Bollywood-style: Punjabi songs now account for 50 percent of chart-toppers. There may be an innumerable number of different Chinese dialects, but the majority share the same written characters – something truly amazing to behold. “I”, “we”, “who”, “two” and “three” date back tens of thousands of years, making them theoldest words in the English language. You will enjoy listening to this language spoken or in song, or, even better, when both happens at once; Wolof translates especially well into rap. It has grown into a lingua franca of sorts in the region, and over time has built up a significant body of poetry and song. Not to mention, it is the official language of 20 countries, opening you up to … Table 2 lists the 10 most powerful languages according to the PLI. The Indian languages of Hindi and Bengali cap off the top five by native speakers as well. Discover where to study with the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2020: English Language and Literature. What constitutes a language or a dialect is hotly contested stuff. At the time of writing, the debate about its role in Indian education and society has once again flared up: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, is seeking to have Hindi displace English in the southern Indian states as the primary language of official communication and education, a strategy that has been met with resistance. If you can understand this article and exchange some words in English, you’re already in luck! But this is another instance of numbers not telling the full tale: Arabic, like Chinese, is so vastly different in its respective dialects as to be effectively a number of languages, grouped as one for the sake of convenience. Source Spoken by 78 million people and official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, Tamil is the oldest language in the world.It is the only ancient language that has survived all the way to the modern world. Determining what are the most spoken languages in the world is a more difficult task than you might imagine. We haven’t even yet acknowledged the unreliability of data sources, collected at different times by different institutions. Thanks in part to the stand they took, Bengali is still around today and is spoken by about 230 million people in India and Bangladesh. Let’s start with one that most of us can agree on, the language of Dante, da Vinci and Pavarotti. But then again, who doesn’t love a good list? Its history is fairly unique among the world’s major languages. Seeing as Chinese is a tonal language that uses thousands of logograms, it will certainly keep you busy. (Sorry, German — you got dumped from top world languages a few years back.) Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#, says the language is more like C++ than Java. Seeing as Chinese is a tonal language that uses thousands of logograms, it will certainly keep you busy. 1. That doesn’t even include Eastern Punjabi, which is spoken in India. Just like any person or every sunset, each and every language has its own beauty. In the past, Cherokee has been threatened with extinction, but thankfully many young Cherokees are now taking an interest in learning the beautiful language and keeping it alive. It is one of the most powerful programming languages for the.NET framework. So we’ve compiled two versions for you: When tallied according to number of native speakers only, these are the most spoken languages in the world. Whether this is one language — Hindustani — or two dialects is still fiercely debated. Much like every sunset – or indeed every person – every language is beautiful in its own way. Engli… English is the most influential academic language, and a knowledge of business English is must to operate in the global business world. India has 23 official languages, with Hindi/Urdu chief among them. If you wish to learn a language that one in six people in the world speak, this is the one for you. For the final section of our list of the best languages to learn in 2020, we’ve taken a look at some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. How many people speak English?1,132 million speakers Learn this language if…you love languages without genders that use simple verb conjugations and have a lot of resources to choose from. Want to speak a language that more than a billion people use daily? Whether your desired career path is public sector or private sector, the Arabic-speaking world’s growing economic clout and complicated relationship with the west ensures bright job prospects for those who can speak this challenging language. It’s also the native language of more than 400 million people across 44 countries, which makes it one of the most useful languages to know.For those who want to do business, Spanish skills can be an asset for communicating in Spain and throughout Latin America. The Partition of Bengal by the British in 1947 divided (mainly Hindu) West Bengal, now part of India, from its (mainly Muslim) counterpart East Bengal, now Bangladesh. But it is certainly the primary language of most of South and Central America, Spain, and, ahem, large swathes of the US. India is famous for its linguistic diversity, and one of the most beautiful languages spoken on the Indian Subcontinent is certainly Bengali. If you ever travel in the Indian subcontinent, a little Hindi will get you a long way. Plus, according to the World Economic Forum, it’s the 5th most powerful language in the world. If we were only to look at native speakers, Spanish has its nose in front of English with about 460 million speakers. Here we break down the 13 most useful phrases for traveling around Europe, and translate them into the six most common European languages. Instead of learning 25-45 symbols that represent sounds, like those of us who use alphabets for reading and writing, a Chinese speaker will learn thousands upon thousands of characters that each represent a word. This is another language whose reach owes much to its colonial past. It has a gorgeous writing system to begin with, and a flowing sound that one of the world’s greatest poets, Rabindranath Tagore, used to create his art. It has one completely unique sound, ř, the ‘rzh’ sound in the middle of composer Antonin Dvořák’s surname, which peppers the language and lends it some spice. But what languages dominate this diverse region? Now, before you get upset with us for not including French, let’s arrange our top 10 according to another criteria: When we count the top 10 most spoken languages according to the total number of people who speak them (whether or not the language is their mother tongue), eight of the 10 languages from the list above still make an appearance, but with a few major differences: English narrowly edges out Chinese for the top spot, Japanese and Punjabi lose their spots, and French and Indonesian join the top 10 thanks to the fact that more people speak them as a second language than as a native language. However, the spoken forms of Arabic in, say, Oman and Morocco are so different that a couple of philosophy professors from these countries might be able to discuss the finer points of the ancient texts while still struggling to order lunch. There has been a significant amount of Cherokee-language literature published, possibly because Cherokee has possessed its own writing system since the mid-19th century. The sounds may be unfamiliar to someone who hasn’t studied it, but if you give it a chance, it will blow you away. Over the last several decades, it has undergone a revitalization process that can act as a model for endangered minority languages all over the world. Not only that, but many of the top global economies are English-speaking ones — the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Fast forward 1, 000 years, and now English is the largest global lingua franca, allowing people across cultures everywhere to communicate in either their native, extensively studied, or newly acquired language. It is the language of Kolkata, the Andaman Islands, fabulous sweets, and 130-odd million Bangladeshis — many of whom are extremely vulnerable to climate change. Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 917 million of whom speak Mandarin — but there’s no doubt it’s the most spoken language in the world. It is the world’s lingua franca. Perhaps due to its geographical position on the crossroads between West and East in what can truly be called Central Europe, it somehow sounds less Slavic and more like a unique mixture of Slavic and the other, generally Germanic languages that surround it. 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