Bridging the Gap

» pseudoerasmus - English as the most widely studied second language

I was looking at the 100 most spoken languages in the world. (Not that the number of speakers of a language is necessarily a good indicator of the number of those who study it as a second language, but...) I picked out those candidates which I knew had a lot of people studying it as a second language and did some work.

The number of "second language speakers" for these languages:

Hindi (236)
English (148)
Russian (118)
French (52)
Spanish (86)
German (23)
Portuguese (12)

[Note: Many non-Russians in the CIS speak Russian as their FIRST language.] I couldn't find the figure for Arabic, but I suspect it would place between Russian and French.

A few observations. These figures don't tell us anything about current rates of instruction, and since Russian instruction is falling fast in Central Asia, such informaton matters. More importantly, the number of "second-language speakers" in English, French and Spanish surely undercounts the number who actually study those languages without achieving compentence in them. Just think of all those tens of millions of Japanese who study English but do not speak it. Finally, given that almost nobody studies Hindi outside India, I'd say my case for English is pretty strong.

-- posted by pseudoerasmus

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