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Want To Influence the World? Map Reveals the Best Languages To Speak

Posted by Soulskill on from the speaking-internet-doesn't-help dept.

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.

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting, but ... by Kittenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Interesting, but ... by Sique · · Score: 4, Insightful
      "Culture" is just a big cover we put over very different things. A physician and a physicist will have a big problem to read each other's scientific papers -- mostly they won't even know what the paper is about. And imagine someone from Switzerland and from Brasil try to talk to each other about their favorite outdoor activity during January, even if they find a language they both are fluent in!

      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.)

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  2. Want to influence the world? by Kohath · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:Want to influence the world? by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 4, 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"?