Dear reader,

have you ever considered to learn another language but you were not sure which one to learn? The world becomes more and more globalized and therefore it could be useful to learn another language. But since our time is limited, we need to invest it carefully and wisely. In the case of language learning it means choosing the right language to learn.

There are many people who have a general interest to learn another language. Given the general interest, I‘ll look on this question only from a general perspective. As a consequence, the answer will be general as well. A safe bet would be consequently a good international language.

Hence, I won‘t consider dead languages - like Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew or Sanskrit - and sign languages. And I won‘t consider aficionado‘s langauges such as Modern Greek either. This caveats aren‘t of course arguments against those afore-mentioned languages. If you have an inclination for a particular language, by all means, learn it. If you want to do for instance business in China, learn (Mandarin) Chinese; if you want to live in Latin America, learn Spanish or Portuguese and so on and so forth.

In the next step I‘ll define four main criteria in order to find the best international languages. I‘ll apply those defined criteria in the second step to all existing languages. In the third part you‘ll find the results.

I. Main criteria

I think that there are basically four main criteria which make a language to an international or world language.

   (1)   A particular world language should have a large total number of speakers.

   (2)   It should have also a large number of second language speakers (L2), i.e. people who teach, learn and use it outside of the country of its origin. And of course, the higher the level at which the people speak the language the better.

   (3)   It should be spoken in a lot of countries all over the world.

   (4)   It should be spoken ideally not only in a lot of countries but also in more than one continent. 

II. The criteria applied

(1) Languages by the first main criterion (large number of speakers)

The first main criterion is: The language should have a large number of speakers.
There are at least 6000 natural languages in the world as some linguists claim. In order to see which languages fit the first criterion we need to rank them by the number of speakers and take the top 25 ones with more than 50 million native speakers each. The outcome is this list of languages in alphabetical sequence:

Arabic Bengali French German Hausa Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu) Italian Japanese Javanese Korean Malay (incl. Indonesian and Malaysian) Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese) Marathi

Persian Portuguese Punjabi Russian Spanish Swahili Tamil Telugu Turkish Vietnamese Wu Chinese (incl. Shanghainese) Yue Chinese (incl. Cantonese)

Source of the underlying data is the Ethnologue: Languages of the World: https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size

(2) Languages by the second main criterion (L2 speakers)

I apply here the second criterion of course only to the languages I found by the first criterion. The second criterion is: It should have also a large number of second language speakers (L2), i.e. people who teach, learn and use it outside of the country of its origin. And of course, the higher the level at which the people speak the language the better. There aren‘t unfortunately many numbers about the languages which are being learnt globally.

Spanish, French and to a lesser degree German are the globally most studied languages. In the east, people learn or used to learn Russian. In Asia, there are basically three studied languages: Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.

Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-worlds-languages-in-7-maps-and-charts/

http://making.duolingo.com/which-countries-study-which-languages-and-what-can-we-learn-from-it

(3) Languages by the third main criterion (countries)

In the last step, we have seen that the following languages made it to the list: Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.
In this case it is easier to kick out the languages which are spoken only in one or few countries than to check the rest of the languages. Those are Japanese and Korean.

(4) Languages by the fourth main criterion (continents)

Spanish, French and Russian - even Russia alone is in two continents - are spoken in more than one continent. But we need to kick out German and Mandarin. German is only spoken in central Europe and Mandarin Chinese is only spoken in the People's Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore.

III. Conclusion

If you have the general desire to learn a foreign language, then are Spanish, French and to a lesser degree, because it's in decline, Russian good options.

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments below what you think and what your choice would be.