Want To Influence the World? Map Reveals the Best Languages To Speak 150
sciencehabit writes: Speak or write in English, and the world will hear you. Speak or write in Tamil or Portuguese, and you may have a harder time getting your message out. Now, a new method for mapping how information flows around the globe (abstract) identifies the best languages to spread your ideas far and wide. One hint: If you're considering a second language, try Spanish instead of Chinese.
In Japan, Japanese, English (Score:1)
Mandarin vs. Spanish (Score:3, Informative)
I speak (and read and write) both Mandarin and Spanish.
Spanish is a lot easier for an English-speaker to learn.
But Mandarin is, at least IMHO, much more interesting. I enjoy the characters, preferring the traditional ones, coping with the simplified ones.
The most difficult problem I had learning Chinese is that the dominant system of romanization, pinyin, is wholly non-intuitive and conflicting to me as a reader of English. It's frustrating because there are *very* few sounds in Chinese that really couldn't
Re:Mandarin vs. Spanish (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're having trouble with pinyin, and since you already seem to prefer traditional characters, then just use bopomofo/zhuyin fuhao. Once you learn one pronunciation system well, it's trivial to learn the other because the sounds they represent are the same, all you have to do is link them up in your mind. I personally used pinyin for many years, but using an Anki deck, I learned zhuyin fuhao in a matter of days after I moved to Taipei.
Learning Chinese is a loooooooooong road. For the casual language learner, I'd say your best ROI on your time is going to be with Spanish. But then again, it all depends on what you're motivated to learn, because motivation is the worst thing to waste. I will say however, that if your motivation is even remotely to raise your value in the eyes of Chinese girls, don't bother, because of the girls that date westerners, given the choice between fluent Chinese and six pack abs, they'll choose the abs about 90% of the time.
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Ok, so I grabbed a dictionary app that provides for zhuyin. The task here is to learn an entirely new alphabet with its associated sounds. Not sure that's an improvement, lol. Though I suppose if you have no preconceptions, as come with English-like spellings, It might work out well. I didn't have any trouble at all with hangul (Korean.) I'll give zhuyin a try; I appreciate the tip.
also... once I understood the alphabet issue, I went looking for zhuyin flashcards (under Android -- I use a Note 3)... nothin
Re: Mandarin vs. Spanish (Score:2)
I suspect it was dialog, not food, that was the object.
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Yes, they will cook actual Chinese food for us; the region they're from is southern China, they're native Cantonese speakers (and eaters) although all the adults are fluent in Mandarin. The real Chinese food is mostly for the family, but we've become good friends with them and have had the opportunity to sample quite a few... unusual... things. It's interesting to watch them eat things like chicken feet, crunching away at every last bit with great enthusiasm.
The first time I caught a cold and let them know,
Hi-Res Image? (Score:2)
Is there a higher resolution image, preferably a PNG, of the map? I cannot make out a single language in the image attached to the article.
Re:Hi-Res Image? (Score:4, Informative)
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The visualization must be flawed. No connection between Swedish and German? The raw data lists more content translated from Swedish to German than Swedish to English. Yet the arrow to English is very thick and no connection between German and Swedish :(
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Agreed. The image on that page reminds me of all of the PowerPoint slides that have been introduced with the words, "I know you can't see this, but . . . "
Hay! (Score:1)
No me gusta!
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Wrong "Ay"...
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and he didn't say 'con permiso'
Interesting, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, how you automatically judge merit is another matter....
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
If the article about communicating with animals at a conversational level is published, the information will be translated into English.
Seriously, though, why do we still speak hundreds of languages? - I know... because culture! Culture is a lousy, empty, truly vapid reason. A large percentage of the human race's information is in English, a flawed, but serviceable (and malleable) trade language that served the British well for several centuries. As the study pointed out, English is, far and above all others, a global language.
It's a shame that it will likely be centuries before mankind figures out how to be more informationally efficient and come up with some sort of "basic" language. I'd even go along with Esperanto if the powers that be would just pick something and move the human race to it.
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So you advocate Monoculture?
Let's go one step further. 'Murican! Don't need nothin' else!
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As the other person said, I'm not against cultures, just that it's a bad reason to isolate segments of humanity into ghettos of language.
Plenty of people commemorate their cultural heritage without demanding exclusive use of the language. They are separate things, but too easily confused by more short-sighted, prideful people (the Quebecois and French are a good example of this). I suspect this is more rooted in our hard-wired tendency toward xenophobia (i.e. fear of things 'unfamiliar').
As I also stated, t
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It is not strictly true that language controls thought, as George Orwell posited and untold proponents of Politically Correct speech believe. You can ask no better example of that, than all the permutations of meaning that the word "nice" has had over time - some of them flattering, some insulting.
However, language does provide viewpoints. English and Spanish are quite different in many ways, but an astounding number of Spanish and English idioms translate back and forth almost word for word.
German, on the
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So you advocate Monoculture?
Let's go one step further. 'Murican! Don't need nothin' else!
Who said anything about 'murican? Though I disagree with him if he advocates trashing other languages. I think some languages are fascinating and/or pleasant to hear: Gaelic, Brythonic, French, German, I even like Old English (Anglo Saxon) and Norse. Finiish and Russian are interesting. For some reason though, I don't like Spanish or Italian much, even though I like old Latin. I know, it makes little sense. But anyway, language is a part of culture, they can't be so readily separated.
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But humor is language dependent. And so is in fact every communication. And therefore so is culture. So, language partially defines a culture. And therefore is we were to drop all other languages and adopt English as a language, cultures (or at least parts of them) would soon diminish and disappear. And the world would become that much more boring.
Cultural differences are not impossible without language, but different languages make it easier to diversify.
It's a good idea to have one or two main languages i
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As the study pointed out, English is, far and above all others, a global language.
It's a shame that it will likely be centuries before mankind figures out how to be more informationally efficient and come up with some sort of "basic" language.
It's a universal language - even the aliens on TV speak English. As for a "basic" language [wikipedia.org], it's been available since 1954.
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If only it were possible for humans to speak more than one language, then they could keep their original language and also communicate in one or more global languages! Alas, it is, sadly, impossible. /sarcasm
Like it or not, language helps maintain a lot more than just "lousy, empty, vapid" culture. It also helps maintain useful culture, history, unique philosophical concepts, unique observations about the world around us, and I am sure countless other important characteristics, discoveries, and contribution
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Any concepts "lost in translation" could be easily appended as a new word to a common tounge, there's an absurd amount of redundancy in that there are hundreds (thousands?) of ways to express simple concepts like "yes". The English say yes, the French oui, the Germans ja, the Spanish si, the Russians da, the Japanese hai, the Portugese sim, the Polish tak... is there a value to this? Language barriers are sand in the machinery for any kind of human endeavour in science, technology, commerce, travel, communi
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In fact there is. Because the apparently simple concepts you have listed are not quite the same. Polish "tak" comes, in fact, from the same protoslavic word that means "so (it is)" which exists in every Slavic language in the same or nearly the same form (tak, tako, taka), so a Croat or a Russian or a Czech would understand it as a kind of a co
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Language also embeds within it history. And history is important for many reasons (many of which are related to "if you don't study it, you'll repeat it").
Europe's an interesting study - you have the Barbaric English, the Germanic Germans, the Romantic French/Spanish/Italians, and so forth. All of which reflect the interesting history and empires of Europe. (Romantic - sure we like to think of the French as good at love, and that may be the origins of the word "romantic" in English, yet it refers to the mor
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It's a shame that it will likely be centuries before mankind figures out how to be more informationally efficient and come up with some sort of "basic" language. I'd even go along with Esperanto if the powers that be would just pick something and move the human race to it.
What "powers that be" do you suppose there are who have the wherewithal to move the entire human race to a single language? What do you do with the multitude of words that can't neatly be translated? Words that carry a special meaning for the underlying culture? Your desired future sounds oppressive, monolithic, and dull. And I say that as a native English speaker...
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Great idea! Now we all only need to agree on which language to standardize on. I'm sure that worldwide discussion will be calm, focused and productive. Please post the results here in the thread once it's been decided.
I suggest Swedish. It's just about equally well known by almost everybody in the world, so nobody is starting out with an unfair advantage. I get a lifetime gig teaching Swedish to everybody. And you get umlauts! Win-win.
Oh, and by "suggest" I of course mean "absolutely demand or I will refuse
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
åÅäÄöÖ and Ï are just some examples, there are others.
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Why would we possibly want a single language? A single human can speak many languages and several billions of us already do. Stop being intellectually lazy.
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Language is much more than just a communications protocol. Language has connotations, language is malleable by its speakers, language contains concepts of the world, language is even a tool to make a difference between insiders and outsiders. We will never be able to speak one common language. No physicist will ever be able to learn about all the terms a physician needs in his daily work, and most Brazilians will never learn anything about skiing in a certain valley of the Alps. Every generation comes up with new words for old facts just because the parents should not understand everything their children are talking about.
Each language has a big body of texts encoded in this language, which are unique to this language, and most of it was never translated into any other language (you don't believe it? How much of french TV programming was ever translated into English for instance?). The idea that most of the world's knowledge is available in English is completely misguided. It's just most of the knowledge you have that is available in English. But you are no benchmark of what knowledge is. If we switch to only one single language for everyone, all the text in all the other languages will be lost forever. How minuscule the english knowledge about non-english events is, can be easily demonstrated by asking you, how much you know about the events of the Summer of 1989 in Hungary. Nevertheless this is very important for the understanding of today's world, because the talks between Hungary's minister of Foreign Affairs Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock during the Pan-European Picnic lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. There are hundreds of news paper articles and reports available in Hungarian and German, in Czech and in Romanian, there are scientific papers about the events in those languages, but how much are available in English? In the U.S. there is still the opinion prevalent that Ronald Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall in 1988 had something to do with it. (Fun fact: It hasn't.)
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Thank you for challenging a main point of the OP's post that I wanted to challenge and forgot to in my own reply: that "a large percentage of the human race's information is in English."
I feel that that's a major mistake in the OP's analysis, and think that it's really the opposite: a small percentage of the human race's information is in English.
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Japanese speaker here. English is not an adequate replacement for Japanese I'm afraid, and I'm not sure it can be modified enough to perform that function without becoming unintelligible to other English speakers.
The way the Japanese look at the world and think about things is fundamentally different to how native English speakers to, and the language is a big part of that. It's hard to explain without teaching you Japanese, but for example they distinguish between animate and inanimate things with many subtle ramifications. If they were to abandon those concepts it would be very difficult for many Japanese speakers to express complex ideas clearly and precisely because as well as using different words they would need to translate the entire concept itself into "western" terms.
Even if people could be convinced to change, what would happen to Japanese society and culture? So much of it is based on how the languages makes you think about things or relate to other people. For example, Japanese has four levels of politeness and you can say the same thing in four different ways depending on your relationship with the other person. Customers expect to be spoken to very politely, and using very informal and familiar terms is a form of social grooming between friends and lovers.
I'm not an expert on Chinese but I believe there are similar problems. Chinese doesn't even have a word for "no", to give you an idea of how fundamentally different it is. If there was to be a world language it would have to be something better than English, and I'm not sure any one language could cover every requirement and still be reasonably universal.
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Chinese doesn't even have a word for "no", to give you an idea of how fundamentally different it is.
The "Do not want" meme was caused by the Chinese lack of the word "no" - See here [winterson.com] or here [winterson.com] for one of my all time favourite things. It makes the new Star Wars films watchable.
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This is common amongst Asian languages or at least Asian cultures.
When communicating with contractors and businesses in many Asian nations it's often an exercise to figure out if "yes" means "yes we can" or "yes we cant"
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What's the best outfit to wear when talking to dogs?
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That's only because you mumble.
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You can talk to dogs in any language. They cannot understand complex sentences
That depends on what breed of dog and how you define 'complex'. Border Collies are well known for their grasp of vocabulary; we could give our BC commands along the lines of "Go into Steve's room and get the red toy." and she'd do it. That sentence is complicated enough to place it out of reach for many humans who have only limited English abilities.
Money speaks (Score:1)
These days, money speaks louder than words, in any language, even C++.
Want to influence the world? (Score:5, Insightful)
You probably shouldn't want to influence the world. People who would say they "want to influence the world" generally lack the humility needed to avoid accidentally or recklessly making things worse for the world as a result of their influence.
Re:Want to influence the world? (Score:5, Insightful)
You probably shouldn't want to influence the world. People who would say they "want to influence the world" generally lack the humility needed to avoid accidentally or recklessly making things worse for the world as a result of their influence.
Quite so.
Every children's TV show or media outlet prattles on endlessly about "changing the world", but they are remarkably non-specific about "change it into what"?
Link to full article PDF (Score:2)
Website of the study (Score:3)
With interactive graphs, rankings, etc.
http://language.media.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]
Um (Score:2)
Er, yeah. English is the Lingua Franca and has been for a long time.
So I guess it's not verboten to say so if you use a graphic and stuff ...
Maps are limited by the cartographic method (Score:1)
A map by territory shows places that are pretty empty but have a common language.
A map by population has problems handling multiple languages in use in one location.
A map by language density using vertical bars or color shading to imply pop density might work, if dithered properly.
80 years it was German (Score:2)
Re:80 years it was German (Score:5, Informative)
80 years ago the Lingua Franca for diplomacy was French. In fact, French dominated diplomacy from the 17th century until WW2. English didn't start getting used in non-English diplomatic circles until after WW1 (it was quite significant when the Treaty of Versailles was written in both English and French). French has been eclipsed by English, but it is still popular (it is the second most used language in the UN and the EU).
For science and technology, Latin used to dominate. Once people stopped publishing in Latin, three dominant languages appeared: English, French, and German. Which was dominant depended on the field being discussed. Before WW1, German may have been the largest of the three, but after WW1, English was noticeably more dominant (and has only continued to grow).
For business, the general rule is that whenever possible the seller speaks the buyers language. 80 years ago, there were several useful intermediate languages that could be used to facilitate business. The most common would be English, French, and Arabic. I don't know that German was used much outside of Europe and the few German colonies. French was probably the smallest here, since outside of Europe it was most spoken in Africa, where it had to compete with Arabic as a language of trade. There are plenty of other languages which are influential at a regional level, such as Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili, but these haven't had much of an impact globally. Due to its size and economic might, I expect that Chinese will become more influential in the future, and it will slowly become more significant outside of Asia. I don't see Spanish moving outside of Europe and the Americas, at least not in the short term.
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Due to its size and economic might, I expect that Chinese will become more influential in the future, and it will slowly become more significant outside of Asia.
I predict that any slow change in Chinese uptake will also be small, because the language is difficult to learn and the culture is impenetrable.
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Technically, a "Lingua Franca" is a language used by two people whose first language is something else entirely. I, for example, can't use English as a Lingua Franca, since it's my first language. I have, however, spoken to a Spanish person (who could not speak English) in French, therefore was using French as a kind of Lingua Franca.
The original Lingua Franca [wikipedia.org] was a trading language used around the Mediterranean from about 1000 years ago, and was originally based predominantly on northern Italian dialects
Here's the actual paper, in PDF (Score:4, Informative)
I speak Ukrainian (Score:2)
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Many people say that they speak Ukrainian. Most of them speak either an ugly mongrel of Russian vocabulary with Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation or an ugly mongrel of Polish vocabulary with Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation.
I wish that if they use that kind of a mixed language, they'd use Czech words instead of Polish ones - they are far less ugly and closer in phonetics.
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The same can be said about English and Russian — the two other languages I'm fluent in. From that I'd extrapolate, that all languages have this problem.
It may (or even may not) be lamentable, but that's not, what I wanted to talk about.
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No, it cannot be said.
Certainly not about English, because it would mean that a majority of English speaking population would usually talk mostly using words from a closely related language - that would be what, Frisian? - with English accent and grammar.
That might maybe happen in Scotland, where English and Scots might intermix in this way, but this kind of speaking is far from majority.
It certainly is not the way here in Germany, people won't, for example, speak Dutch using German grammar and accent. They
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It does not have to be "closely related" — you just need to have a sizable chunk of population fluent in it. Over the years Americans, for example, have borrowed plenty from Yidish ("potz", "schmuck", "boychik"), Russian ("da"), Italian ("capish? [urbandictionary.com]").
Centuries ago, when the
I'm just happy to get anyone to read what I write (Score:1)
In other words, the value of a language comes down to who you want to use it to communicate with.
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Re: I'm just happy to get anyone to read what I wr (Score:3)
Your experience is very IT specific. If you were in construction or food service you would be using Spanish daily.
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So basically, if you want to talk to educated people who actually make things work in the world, don't waste your time learning Spanish.
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Not at all. If you do business in Mexico and Latin America, Spanish is very helpful. However, most educated people in those countries are at least conversational in English. My reply was specifically about why a Canadian IT worker would not encounter Spanish on a day to day basis even though Spanish is likely to be the most common secondary language. (Or in the case of Canada, tertiary)
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Mexico and other Latin American countries are not exactly highly industrialized. If you want to get something made, you either go to Germany or Japan (if it's really high-dollar and needs extreme precision) or you go to China (if it's cheaper and you need huge volumes). Latin America is where you go if you just need some agricultural produce.
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What the hell are you talking about? Have you ever been to Monterrey? Mexico has a large industrial base and the economy there is booming. They are a huge trading partner with the U.S. We do tons of business with them even if you exclude agriculture.
https://www.census.gov/foreign... [census.gov]
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Just to put the facts on record, here are the stats for Jan-Oct 2014:
(in Millions of dollars)
Germany: exports to: 41,672 imports from: 102,542
Mexico: exports to: 201,714 imports from: 246,124
If you exclude agriculture from both, Mexico is still much higher. Sorry to be obsessive about this but I do a lot of business in Mexico and I'm constantly annoyed by the people who think the whole country is like Cancun, Cabo. They do have their problems, especially in the remote areas, but the middle clas
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Your experience is very IT specific. If you were in construction or food service you would be using Spanish daily.
Your experience is very US-centric.
If you lived in Australia you'd find it hard to find anyone who spoke Spanish.
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I can tell you that in my field, Chinese is used at least 4x more often than Spanish.
Massage parlor?
Language depends on your target audience... (Score:4, Interesting)
...and on the content your are writing, and the sort of influence you want to have. I know of several Tamil writers online who have dedicated following. If you want to influence online Tamil community, then I don't see the point of writing in English or Spanish.
There is probably some purpose for this study, but it is definitely lost in the blurb written above. While it is obvious that most of the internet talks in English, the ability to weild influence online is not just dependent on the language you are writing in. With instant page translations, good amount of the written content is accessible to larger section of audience, regardless of the language it is written in.
I do not think it means what you think it means .. (Score:2)
If you want to communicate via language and language alone, then this type of study shows the connectivity of those linguistic works. However, there are many more influences in life than pure linguistic works, including economic, political, technological, military, cultural, and religious power. Considering these other powers probably leads to very different conclusions concerning the best languages for influencing the world. Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword, and sometimes the sword has more
Spanish is great (Score:2)
If you want to ask Donde Esta La Biblioteca? or tell someone to clean your pool, bot USELESS for business (unless you make "us" cars).
Both article and summary wrong (Score:1)
Looking at their (horribly small) graph it seems that the two best 2nd languages for English speakers are French (if you want to talk to Africa) and Russian (if your want to talk to Putin's near abroad).
Spanish doesn't win you much that you don't get with English + French.
Enhance!, Err... I mean, Link! (Score:2)
Linky with higher res PDF than website...
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea... [pnas.org]
And that's why... (Score:2)
If you're only going to speak a paltry three languages, English, Spanish, and French make a good trio.
Thinking about this reminds me of the day a German-born guy from Québec, three Africans from three different countries, and I all came together one day to find common ground in our mutually mangled French. That basically proves the point underlying the graphic and the article right there.
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And let me be the first to say that the map would be a lot more interesting if it was actually legible.
Write in letters four pixels high, and you may have a hard time getting your message out.
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Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:4, Funny)
Hold down your ctrl key and scroll in. It's not rocket surgery.
Umm ... no. It is a jpeg image, not HTML. So scrolling in just makes it big and blurry instead of small and blurry. I even trying shouting "enhance! enhance!"
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Sorry, it's "mejorar! mejorar!" and don't forget "Por favor" and maybe a small 'propina'.
Re: Let me be the first to say... (Score:2)
Try 'con permiso'...
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Well, I can read every word on it, so...I dunno, get new glasses?
don't be a dumbass, that visualization is crap. so ... I dunno, go to the source?
http://language.media.mit.edu/... [mit.edu]
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I even trying shouting "enhance! enhance!"
I think that only works on the new Google phone. Or pictures of it.
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My phone doesn't have a ctrl key, you insensitive clod!
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
except the nearest bus station is not the world.
I am actually not sure how TFA comes to the conclusion that spanish would be a good second language. The question should be "assuming I already speak English, which second language should I speak." If 95% (pulled out of a hat) of spanish speakers also speak english, then learning spanish might not actually allow you to reach much more people.
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Re: Let me be the first to say... (Score:2)
Of the bilinguals I deal with, Francophones will speak English with minimal reluctance. Asians will readily. Spanish-speakers much less so. But my sample size is in the dozens.
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I am actually not sure how TFA comes to the conclusion that spanish would be a good second language. The question should be "assuming I already speak English, which second language should I speak."
That question can't really be answered on its own. If you live in the United States Spanish is probably a solid choice for you. If you live in Finland not so much...
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Nearest bus-station, people speak a lot of different languages.
Likely the first 15 random people there, speak 15 different languages natively, though most of them likely also have some understanding of French.
How that, by your reasoning, means that Spanish is dominant ... yeah, no idea.
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Very much so. I work for a company that employs people that came from 20 different countries. Not a single one of them speaks Spanish.
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Many people forget that Spanish and Portuguese are brother languages. So thats Brazil and Portugal on the top of the Spanish speaking world.
Sure, they might hate each other for the slightly different base accent, but the Mexicans do hate the Madridians for their stiff el macho accent.
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My understanding is that Portuguese is much closer to Latin than Spanish (Castilian) is. (Also, Galician is very close to Portuguese.) Basically, Spanish is a crappy derivative of Latin.
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All languages are derived from a precursor language. What makes a derivative 'crappy'?
If any language is a crappy derivative, then English [mentalfloss.com] has the most going for it. Maybe as a native English speaker you never realized, but English is a terribly inconsistent language concerning spelling and pronounciation.
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It is terribly inconsistent, true, however it's also extremely adaptable, which is why it has a much larger vocabulary than any other language. Basically, English is the Borg of languages.
Spanish is crappy because it has a ridiculously low information density compared to just about every other language. It's horribly verbose and has too many syllables to say the simplest things.
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Everything I've ever seen in both English and Spanish looked about 1.5-2 times longer in the Spanish version.
Don't take my word for it; some linguistic researchers actually looked into this, which you can read about here [time.com].
Here's an excerpt:
For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.
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Here's some more handy links about this research:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... [sciencedaily.com]
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_... [eurekalert.org]
Unfortunately, Latin was not one of the languages they investigated in this research, but I do find it very interesting how Latin, which is one of Spanish's parent languages, is far, far more efficient (in dI/dS terms) than Spanish is, and in fact is probably more efficient and complex than any of its derivatives.
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off to the russian front for you
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So now we have the AC who tries to Godwin every fucking story... I hope you're 14 and will grow out of it someday.
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Keep dreaming. Maybe we are 80% there, but the remaining 20% will take 90% of the time and effort. We are going to be stack with the often-amusing Google translations for a while, and the Microsoft/Skype effort is going to be a constant source of mirth for years.
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Mandarin and Cantonese differ a lot when spoken, but have similar written forms (especially for more formal writing). Since the study looks at written languages (books and websites) it makes sense to lump the many written forms of Chinese together.
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