What are the top three most useful languages for business after English? Surprisingly, Spanish didn’t make the cut despite being the official language of 20 countries and spoken by over 329 million people, according toBloomberg Rankings.
Not surprisingly, Mandarin Chinese is the most useful language for business after English, spoken by 845 million people in the world’s second-largest economy, China.
French (no. 2) and Arabic (no. 3) follow, with Spanish ranking fourth. Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Italian, Korean, and Turkish followed.
To create the list, Bloomberg Rankings identified the 25 languages with the greatest number of native speakers, then narrowed the list to the 11 official languages of G20 countries, excluding those that designated English.
French is spoken by 68 million people worldwide and the official language of 27 nations. Arabic, which is spoken by 221 million people, is the official language in 23 nations, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg notes their list differs from the top foreign languages studied in U.S. colleges in 2009 from the Modern Language Association, published in December 2010.
Spanish topped that list with 864, 986 enrollments, dwarfing French which followed next with 216, 419 (no. 2), German (no. 3), American Sign Language (no. 4), Italian (no. 5), Japanese (no. 6), Chinese (no. 7), Arabic (no. 8), Latin (no. 9) and Russian (no. 10).
See: abc News
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Sep 2, 2011
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Türkiye
Local time: 22:24
Member (2007)
Turkish to English
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I am surprised to see Turkish in there. Maybe it is time that Amazon carries some Turkish titles.
Russian Federation
Local time: 22:24
Italian to Russian
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Is it correct to say that the ASL is a foreign or "other than English" (quote from the MLA survey) sign system?
United Kingdom
Local time: 20:24
French to English
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As I understand, the ranking was produced by arbitrarily taking these various factors (number of countries, GDP, internet users etc), taking a ranking by each factor and summing each coun... See more
As I understand, the ranking was produced by arbitrarily taking these various factors (number of countries, GDP, internet users etc), taking a ranking by each factor and summing each country's ranking. I see no motivation for the rationale behind the choice of factors or how they were weighted-- in fact, I don't think they were weighted at all, so that having two more countries speaking your language then the country 2 down from you in that ranking gives you an equal advantage to having 10 times the GDP of a country two rankings below you.
And they're quite crude factors in any case. When you look at the data, Spanish-speakings countries have almost twice the GDP of Arabic-speaking countries, and Spanish-speaking countries rank roughly the same or higher on various other scores. The main factor where Arabic countries score higher is on % GDP going on imports/exports (though the actual amount of money involved works out roughly the same: they have a higher % of a smaller GDP). So you'd really need to drill down into WHAT is being imported/exported, and what value of that import/export is specifically added by translation.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, it's not clear how this ranking reliably calculates the actual "business value" of given languages, so be careful how much you read into it.
[Edited at 2011-09-03 15:38 GMT] ▲ Collapse
Russian Federation
Local time: 22:24
Italian to Russian
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Neil Coffey wrote:
"it's not clear how this ranking reliably calculates the actual "business value" of given languages"
Agree, and would like to add that really objective ranking should be confirmed by the horoscope for covered period. (i am serious [almost]) For that, an authoritative rating of horoscopes would be useful
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