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Re: [engelang] The future of languages.

2012/9/25 John Cowan <cowan@hidden.email>
 

Leonardo Castro scripsit:

> This reminds me that I recently tried to figure out
> which 10 languages should I know if I want to
> maximize the probability of successful communication
> with my first neighbour if I am sent to a random point

I assume you mean "random point on land".

Well, if I fall over the sea, I will still have a "first neighbour",
wherever he is.

 


> on the globe. Let me write them down for the first time:

Wikipedia says, with lots of appropriate caveats:

1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
2. English (480 million)
3. Arabic (441 million)
4. Spanish (320 million)
5. Russian (285 million)
6. French (270 million)
7. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
8. Portuguese (248 million)
9. Bengali (185 million)
10. Japanese (133 million)

This includes second-language speakers, but the definition of that term
may be quite loose.

However, this table takes no account of the global reach of languages.
With a probability of 1/15, you will land in China, where the chances of
having a first- or second-language speaker of Mandarin are excellent.
In the rest of the world, they are rather poor. I don't know what to
do to take this into account.

I was aware of this list, but I was really trying to take into account
geographic spread in my imaginary experiment. The probability
of landing in Japan would be very little, and I would probably be
able to communicate in English there, as Japanese education system
is very good. Maybe Russian was a more serious neglect;
I have no idea of the proportional of anglophones in Russia.