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The Washington Post has an article asking the question "Which languages will dominate the future?" The answer depends on your interests: making money in growth markets; speaking with as many people as possible; speaking only one language while traveling; or learning about culture. As you might imagine, the article concludes
There is no one single language of the future. Instead, language learners will increasingly have to ask themselves about their goals and own motivations before making a decision.
[...] In a recent U.K.-focused report, the British Council, a think tank, identified more than 20 growth markets and their main languages. The report features languages spoken in the so-called BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — that are usually perceived as the world's biggest emerging economies, as well as more niche growth markets that are included in lists produced by investment bank Goldman Sachs and services firm Ernst & Young.
"Spanish and Arabic score particularly highly on this indicator," the British Council report concluded for the U.K. However, when taking into account demographic trends until 2050 as laid out by the United Nations, the result is very different.
Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Indonesian will dominate much of the business world by 2050, followed by Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian. If you want to get the most money out of your language course, studying one of the languages listed above is probably a safe bet.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 25 2015, @01:16PM
I concur on Russian and Arabic. Once oil is passe, they're passe.
Chinese is not that hard to gain a grasp of, though. The grammar is simple and the pronunciation of the characters is consistent, not at all like Japanese, which chooses from multiple Chinese- and Japanese readings of kanji at seeming random. Chinese characters work rather more like a really big alphabet, and the radicals assembled to make an ideogram give you a real leg up to grasp the meaning, something about the pronunciation, and help a lot with recall in the same way that memory experts advise you to make up funny sentences or images to remember words or concepts. The hardest thing about Chinese is developing an ear for tones, and retaining it after you haven't been immersed in it for a while. Once swimming in it daily, though, it's easy to pick up the patter. That said, I do entirely agree that nobody's gonna learn Chinese unless China physically conquers the world and forces everybody to learn it in colonial fashion.
German is a great language, but despite the shared heritage with English and a lot of common vocabulary, the grammar is a bear. It's harder than English. Case declensions and funky word order complicate things a lot. Plus, nobody outside of Central Europe really speaks German. There's not much of a residual colonial past to help it out globally, the way there is for French. So it's much more likely to be like Chinese: great to know if you're there, but not much else.
Spanish will putter along as it always has, indispensible in Central and South America, not much use elsewhere.
Indonesian would tickle me pink, because you gotta love a language where to make something plural, you say it twice: "cewek" -- chick, "cewek cewek" -- chicks.
Nah, the real answer is English. English is still the language to learn and will be for a long, long time.
Washington DC delenda est.