Interesting book about the world’s current top 20 languages, how history, politics, and geography have shaped their usage and how time and chance has developed their linguistic features. The book is structured with a chapter on each language, highlighting a specific unique element of that language.

For example, the last chapter discussed the status of English as the current global lingua franca with an uncertain future. It may be molded in the future by a simplified globalized English which would remove unnecessary synonyms, grammatical oddities, and spelling variations. Alternatively English could be splintered by regional variants like Singlish (like what happened to Latin’s transformation to Romance languages). English could also be replaced at the top by the comparatively more difficult Mandarin (current #2) as a result of China’s growing influence. And another option still would be that artificial intelligence and technology could continue making strides in instant translations, resulting in everyone just speaking only in their mother tongue… although complications exist here too. What will happen to English? Only time will tell!

Here’s a countdown of the top 20…

20 Vietnamese | 85 million
19 Korean | 85 million
18 Tamil | 90 million
17 Turkish | 90 million
16 Javanese | 95 million
15 Persian | 110 million
14 Punjabi | 125 million
13 Japanese | 130 million
12 Swahili | 135 million
11 German | 200 million
10 French | 250 million
9 Malay | 275 million
8 Russian | 275 million
7 Portuguese | 275 million
6 Bengali | 275 million
5 Arabic | 375 million
4 Hindi-Urdu | 550 million
3 Spanish | 575 million
2 Mandarin | 1.3 billion
1 English | 1.5 billion