Discover the Most Popular Language Now and in 50 Years

There are more than 7000 languages on Earth, however, most of the population only speaks a bit over 20 of them. As globalization continues, languages will continue to streamline and more will go extinct. What language will rise to the top? We’ll discover the most popular language now and in 50 years.

What Is the Most Popular Language Now?

Today, English is the most popular language on the planet. Over 65 countries officially recognize English as a national language. Major countries where English is the primary language are the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

400 million people are native English speakers, and another 1.5 billion use English as a supplementary language. This means that about 20 percent of the world speaks English.

English is currently the lingua franca internationally in business, tourism, and more. More than 2 out of 3 businesses around the world use English when communicating.

How Many English Dialects Are There?

There are over 150 dialects of English spoken around the world. In the United States, approximately 25 different dialects exist. Most dialects around the world are a subgenre of 3 main types of English: Australian English, British English, and North American English.

While dialects are disappearing due to globalization, different regions that speak the same umbrella language still speak it in unique ways. What makes them dialects and not separate languages is that they’re mutually intelligible across boundaries by almost all other English speakers.

Dialects exist because different areas of the planet are influenced by unique cultures and nearby foreign languages. As a result, the way that English is pronounced is changed. Grammar is also affected, so sentence structures can also differ based on where an English speaker is located.

What Will Be the Most Popular Language in 50 Years?

The most popular language in 50 years will be Mandarin Chinese. Today, approximately 16 percent of the world speaks Chinese which equates to about 1.3 billion people.

Its use in business settings and its resultant acquisition as a second language is what will drive Chinese into the top spot. The potential growth of the Chinese population is also a driving force for why Mandarin will be the most popular language in 50 years.

Over 900 million of these speakers use Mandarin as their primary language in the People’s Republic of China. Also, more than 20 countries have large groups of native speakers of Mandarin within their borders.

How Many Chinese Dialects Are There?

There are over 200 dialects of Chinese. However, this question is hard to answer because China is so large. In some areas, there are language differences between each village that could qualify as a separate dialect.

Almost all of the dialects of Chinese are understandable to all speakers. There are approximately 9 main branches of dialects with each of these branches having dozens of subgenres. The lingua franca for the Chinese language is Standard Mandarin which can also be called the Beijing dialect.

Mandarin is by far the most proliferous branch of the Chinese language. Within the Mandarin sphere are 4 main genres: Northern, Northwestern, Southern, and Southwest. Under these subgenres, there are over 90 dialects of Mandarin alone.

In Today’s World: What Are the Most Popular Languages on the Internet?

English is the most popular language on the internet. Over half of websites are written in the English language. The rest of the internet is shared by other major languages including Spanish, Russian, German, French, Japanese, Portugues, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.

Spanish is the second most common language used on the internet though its prevalence pales in comparison to English. People who speak both English and Spanish can read about 60 percent of all published material online.

Even though there are over 7000 languages on the planet, there are only a couple hundred being used on the internet. Over 1.1 billion internet users speak English with the second highest linguistic usage group being Chinese at 888 million. There are over 363 million Spanish speakers on the net and over 237 Arabic speakers using the internet.

Despite the dominance of English on the internet, its huge lead is slowly being chipped away. The use of the Arabic language is growing the fastest with more Arabic websites going up every year than any other language. However, less than 1 percent of web pages are currently written in Arabic so it will take a long time for Arabic to challenge English as a primary web language.

What is Esperanto?

Esperanto is a constructed language designed for a globalizing world. The idea behind it is that it provides a culturally neutral form of communication. It also provides simplified sentence structures, conjugations, and fewer irregularities to memorize than traditional languages.

Some critics of Esperanto point to its roots in European languages. Because it’s based on Indo-European language structures, it excludes speakers of other dominant languages from fully comprehending its idiosyncrasies. For example, native Mandarin speakers will have almost as much difficulty learning Esperanto as they do English.

While Esperanto is not an official language anywhere, it is offered as an official course in some countries such as China and Hungary. Despite some of the challenges around the ease of use of Esperanto by Chinese learners, China has embraced the language. It is used by the government in some official communications online, on the radio, and for an e-zine.

Esperanto was created in 1887 with the idea that it could be used as a universal supplemental language. One of its main features is that words can be augmented in such a way that sentences are shorter. The idea is to convey information as precisely as possible in as few utterances as necessary.

While constructed languages have been attempted many times, Esperanto is the most successful. It now has a few thousand native speakers. This means that there is a community of people on the planet who have used this constructed language fluently since birth.

There are about 100 thousand people who speak Esperanto as a supplementary language worldwide. Most of these individuals live in South America, East Asia, and Europe. Exposure to lessons on Esperanto is easy because it’s offered on free language learning services like Duolingo.