The top 25 most useful and influential languages in the world today ranked

Number of speakers, economic value, entertainment value, geographic distribution, and it’s use as a lingua franca in the world.

English is obviously number 1. After that there are a few regionally widespread languages like mandarin, spanish, and french.

I most certainly would replace Mandarin with Russian as number 5 on that list. Influence of a language should take internationality as a factor, of which Mandarin has close to none.

I’m pretty skeptical about these lists anyway. English is (just kind of obviously) going to be number one(!) But aside from that, I don’t really see on what objective basis one can assign ranked places?

Arabic is undoubtedly one of the great languages of the world, but (especially given how it is split into about a zillion strong spoken dialects) it is very doubtful whether it should be placed very high up on list like this one, in my opinion.

French is - again - undoubtedly a great language. But does it deserve to come quite so high up the list, I wonder?

(Personally I’d have Spanish in second place, and Russian+Mandarin jointly in third place, I think. But you can probably argue the toss all ways…)

french should be at ten at least and japanese and german should be in the top ten instead of portuguese and hindu certainly and spanish at two

I have have said before that the Maghrebi Arabic (north and western africa, 70 million speakers) could be considered it’s own language. My friends from Egypt said that it is easier for them to speak to moroccans in english than it is in arabic. It is funny because arabic speakers always insist that it is one single language and that they can all understand each other even though many of them can’t unless they code switch to Modern Standard or some egyptia colloquial.

They are familiar with many of the varieties and MSA and don’t realize how may dialects they understand. In reality it is a family of languages and if we are approaching this list an analysis for the most useful languages to learn… arabic becomes more

I studied levantine (palestine, syria, jordan) arabic for a long time and when I first heard egyptian it was pretty understandable, similar to an american trying to understand a cockney british accent, but plenty of new slang words and from I have been told this is case for most of the dialects on the Arabian peninsula.

From the perspective of a language learner there is no easy answer, the best option would be learn egyptian o levantine as well as MSA… which sucks because msa is really freaking hard.

I really wish Arabic would do what Chinese did and make their own sort of bastardized “standard arabic” as they did with “standard chinese”. That was a new standard as opposed to the archaic MSA which nobody on earth speak as their native language.

Sorry for the ramble I am just fascinated by arabic so I like talking about it.

I agree though, after english there is a drop off and the usefulness of the bigger languages is totally regional specific. For example, How can we possibly quantify the usefulness between russian and portugueues which both have around 200 million plus speakers L1 and L2? Seems like there are half a dozen or so “tier 2” important languages that are far reaching.