These ranking ignore the fact Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than any other two languages in this top ten listing.

Although Spanish and Portuguese are now two separate unintelligible languages, they were virtually the same 800 years ago. Someone literate in one can easily learn the other; it's probably the same with fluency. Machine translation between them is probably very accurate because of their relative closeness and the huge volume of sample data for both languages. Also... Because of geopolitics, Brazil and the rest of Latin America can easily negotiate compromise agreements where they say "put the administrative center for this in Brazil and make Spanish the official language for it".

So perhaps there's more of a case to consider Spanish and Portuguese to be one language for these rankings, than there is to lump all the unintelligible Arabic dialects (Morrocan, Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, and Gulf) into one language, or the unintelligible Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Minbei, Minnan, Xiang, Gan) into one language.

What? The USA doesn't have an official language (like in one recognized by government)?

That's news for me, and it's interesting to think on the implications. I'll point that next time an american complains to me on the web to "speak english".

Is this a winner-takes-all, network effects situation? Are we going to see the entire world speaking English as at least a second language in the next 50-100 years?

Indonesian/Malay is spoken by around 268 million people. It is sometimes rated as the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, yet George Weber barely mentions it.

Indonesia itself has 237 million people, of which almost 100% speak Indonesian/Malay.

The Indonesian/Malay language is a huge gaping hole in George Weber's research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...

Спасибо за статью. Печально, что русский язык не входит в десятку наиболее используемых языков в Internet.

Fig. 3 lowest estimate for # of English speakers is < 300M? What?

Current population of the Anglosphere (Australia / Canada / New Zealand / United Kingdom / United States) = 435M; I'll eat my hat if <75% of the population of these countries speak English. That's saying nothing of all the other Europeans, Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Latinos that speak English. Like the Dutch don't also speak English!?

What the hell was that estimator smoking?

Hell, the max estimate there (~500M) is probably closer to a reasonable minimum.

"It should be a sobering thought, however, to any triumphalist impulse that in 100 AD Latin looked set to dominate its slice of the world forever."

The winner of the "Top Language of 100 AD" should go to Chinese circa 100 A.D.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic

The following languages are heavily influenced by written chinese:

Korean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

Vietnamese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language

As well as a variety of other languages (though the regions where they are from are now considered part of China):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Other_langua...

Moderately influenced:

Mongolian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_language

Thai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language

Here is a picture of Han China and Roman Empire circa 100 A.D.

http://www.roman-empire.net/maps/empire/extent/rome-china-co...

Written Chinese still dominate its slice of the world.

While not all chinese are conversant with Standard Mandarin, (I am not), almost all of them can read and write chinese.

I wonder about the credibility of this article given that it talks about "Chinese" as if it were a single language. There are many spoken languages in China (most notably Mandarin and Cantonese). They share a common written form but if you're talking about the "most influential language" surely the spoken languages should count for something.

Strange that they didn't include quantity and quality of media available in a given language, unless it's somehow covered under "Socio-literary prestige" (which is never precisely defined). This metric may be English's biggest source of influence.

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Looking at the advances in machine translation and speech recognition in the last 10 years, how long before fluency in English becomes irrelevant?

If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)

I find Fig. 13. (Rise and fall of major languages: the historical dimension) quite interesting.

This topic is stressing.

God says... C:\Text\WEALTH.TXT

e of their land and labour, would fall, and would be expressed or represented by a smaller quantity of silver than before; but their real value would be the same as before, and would be sufficient to maintain, command, and employ the same quantity of labour. As the nominal value of their goods would fall, the real value of what remained of their gold and silver would rise, and a smaller quantity of those metals would answer all the same purposes of commerce and circulation which had employed a great

The world is really no longer divided into countries or geographic regions (although politicians like to think otherwise), I feel I have a lot more in common with a programmer in Germany, France or China than the red-neck farmer who lives up the road. We communicate in English simply because the USA dominates (and continues to dominate) the technology and science areas.

It's not Indo-European. It's Indian language Sanskrit which is mother of all languages influenced English. Due to people can't accept that they carry something which is borrowed or adopted, they started adding their names in it. It's the bitter truth.

It's not Indo-European. It's Indian language Sanskrit which is mother of all languages influenced English. Due to people can't accept that they carry something which is borrowed or adopted, they started adding their names in it. It's the bitter truth.