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Want To Influence the World? Map Reveals the Best Languages To Speak
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.
Mandarin or Korean.
All your database are belong to U.S.
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.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
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.
No me gusta!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's good that it's mapping translations rather than language speakers - but it's not mapping content. Say 50% of the tweets in English are concerning Kim Kardashian's latest outfit, or Lady Gaga's pop video. An article in Finnish (why not?) is telling everyone how to talk to dogs. Which is more important to humankind?
Of course, how you automatically judge merit is another matter....
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Hold down your ctrl key and scroll in. It's not rocket surgery.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
These days, money speaks louder than words, in any language, even C++.
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!"
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.
Sorry, it's "mejorar! mejorar!" and don't forget "Por favor" and maybe a small 'propina'.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, I can read every word on it, so...I dunno, get new glasses?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
off to the russian front for you
Here it is... http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/11/1410931111.full.pdf
The authors have an interactive version, which they cite in their paper. Link below:
http://language.media.mit.edu/
With interactive graphs, rankings, etc.
http://language.media.mit.edu/
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 ...
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.
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
True. Just saying that the local bus station might illustrate to OP that people not so far away from him look and speak differently than he does. Just trying to broaden narrow minds, that's all.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
80 years from now it could be something else.
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 be well-approximated with normal English character order and usage. The exceptions, like the pinyin 'r' sound, could be marked another way (for instance, as the Spanish Ñ.) So learning how to say a word without a native speaker turned out to be a real problem. I got a heck of a boost when a real Chinese restaurant opened in our little town. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I even trying shouting "enhance! enhance!"
I think that only works on the new Google phone. Or pictures of it.
Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame. And it's not even paywalled, you can download it from anywhere. You're welcome.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I can tell you that in my field, Chinese is used at least 4x more often than Spanish. Next after Chinese (which is after English) would be Russian, followed likely by German. Whether Spanish is spoken in my field as much as Arabic is debatable.
In other words, the value of a language comes down to who you want to use it to communicate with.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The world would be a lot better off if everyone spoke English and wrote in ASCII, the way God intended.
an ill wind that blows no good
You need to bias a language's scale of use with the amount of freedom you will have in using that language because there is no point communicating in Chinese if it just gets blocked by a government censor.
This puts English and Spanish way out in front.
I live in the USA, so obviously, I speak English, but with the baby steps taken by web translation & computer software, and apps that can now somewhat translate in real time, I would guess in just a few short years, perhaps less than a decade, this might be a moot point as we'll have something similar to a "universal translator" ie: star trek style.
Try 'con permiso'...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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...
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Exactly. The Republicans rule the world, and their kind is too stupid to learn a second language. If you want to be a good slave to our rulers, you need to learn English. While they want nearly everyone that isn't a rich old white man dead, they're more likely to not try to kill you if you are fluent in English.
My phone doesn't have a ctrl key, you insensitive clod!
I know, right? I got a pretty good crash course in Spanish after moving to Mexico for a year in 2000, to a city where almost no-one spoke English. So now I'm fairly fluent in English, French and Spanish. Since leaving Quebec almost 30 years ago, I only speak French with anyone once every few years as a bit of a novelty. Spanish? Absolutely never in the main cities in Canada. I work in IT, and I've only ever met one guy who spoke Spanish. The order is, and has been English, Chinese, Russian, and German, with Hindi floating around on either side of Russian, and Japanese down near the bottom (but still way above Spanish) more or less exactly as you stated, in every corporate environment I've working in for the last 20 years. That includes the teams several other countries. Conclusion: The secondary languages I've learned have absolutely no use in any business I've conducted throughout my entire career in IT.
WTF is "Chinese"? Maybe you meant Mandarin or Cantonese or something?
...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.
How valid is this research paper practically in real world needs to be seen. They are only considering online media ? For eg., thousands of books in various languages are translated and published in different languages, conveying ideas from one language /region to other. How that is included in this research ?
For eg., Malayalam as a language might have seen books from many languages converted to it, published and sold well though not vice versa.
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 influence.
I can tell you that in my field, Chinese is used at least 4x more often than Spanish.
Massage parlor?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
If you dare to hang around the bus stop for an hour the cops will start harassing you ...
... but anyway, why is "Kachin" within the "Chinese" circle?
I thought the "Kachin" language falls within the Indo-Tibetian grouping, and the Mandarin (and various dialects of the Chinese language) is not part of the Indo-Tibetian lingua-group
It's a ridiculously US-centric view, like most news on /.
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/...
You mean "pinch out" with two fingers, right?
When programming, always document your code in English.
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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).
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
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.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Thanks
Some interesting numbers:
Books translated from English: 1,225,237
Books translated from French: 216,624
Books translated from German: 201,718
Books translated from Russian: 101,395
Books translated from Spanish: 52,955
Books translated from Swedish: 39,192
Books translated from Chinese: 13,337
Books translated from Hindu: 1,469
Only 13 thousand Chinese books has been translated? That must leave a ton of old books only accessible to Chinese speakers.
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...
Nonsense.
English+Spanish has significantly more world influence than Finish+Spanish.
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.
Linky with higher res PDF than website...
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
Your experience is very IT specific. If you were in construction or food service you would be using Spanish daily.
Math = universal language. Having one language doesn't work. It's actually a huge disadvantage to rely on a dominant language to communicate, especially in this era of super-spying.
A co-worker of mine from a Mexican family said her father used to say, "Portuguese is just Spanish spoken poorly."
One time she was reviewing a training video when I stopped in, which was in Spanish. I said, "Spanish? Isn't that just Latin spoken poorly?" :)
No, the party burned all the old books decades ago.
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.
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.
Interactive map
http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books
I don't know this 'Chinese' language they write of. I know of Mandarin and Cantonese, and several other dialects in mainland China.
When they write 'Chinese' which of these do they mean?
I also heard there is an official standard in China perhaps they mean that but its unclear.
If you are going to go to the trouble to create a chart and detail all these different languages why screw up on such a basic item?
Seriously, how could they know enough to list out the languages but not enough to know that 'Chinese' is not really a single language?
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)
All languages are derived from a precursor language. What makes a derivative 'crappy'?
If any language is a crappy derivative, then English 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.
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.
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.
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...
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 class is actually GROWING there. Mexico City is one of the worlds largest cities and Monterrey is an industrial powerhouse.
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.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The 16th century called, they want their late-breaking news back.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I took 2 semesters of 1st year college Mandarin last year. Got a virtual B+, but I was just auditing the course. Putting the same effort I expended on learning Mandarin into learning Spanish, I would have been much further along as a Spanish speaker. However, I really enjoy what little I know about Mandarin & that will continue the rest of my life. I now have a window into the cultures of the Middle Kingdom I could have not otherwise gotten.
Taking off my linguistic hat (which tells me that Spanish is just a daughter of Latin, neither better nor worse), I could say that Spanish is an improved version of Latin.
There are lots of things I could say, but I'll just say one: How did you measure information density?
Since I doubt that you actually measured the information density, here are two ways you could do that:
1) Look at page counts of translations of English books from/to Spanish. I don't think they'll be very different.
2) Or if you want to go for the spoken language, look at audio books.
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.
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.
Ah, thanks--I'll have to look up the original article in Language on my shelves when I get back to my office, I'd forgotten about that one.
I guess I was thinking of information density as measured by time (dI/dt), whereas these measurements are by syllable count (dI/dS). They make the point that the time-based measure is virtually the same for all languages. I do wonder what the density as measured by phonemes would be, since Spanish tends to have more open syllables than English. Maybe they looked at this.
Here's some more handy links about this research:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_...
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.