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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.
Link to the original website.
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.
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!"
Wrong "Ay"...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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!”
With interactive graphs, rankings, etc.
http://language.media.mit.edu/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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 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!
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.
Your experience is very IT specific. If you were in construction or food service you would be using Spanish daily.
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 was a trading language used around the Mediterranean from about 1000 years ago, and was originally based predominantly on northern Italian dialects. The term has been applied to other languages like Latin retroactively.