Latin, Math, and Music are the three universal languages. In other words, they transcend the cultural barrier and speak to people regardless of what language they were raised with.
According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers. Like Latin or Greek at the time, English has become the world's common language. It is the default language in international business, tourism, technology, and much more.
Everything About English as a Universal Language. Despite other languages having more speakers, English is the universal language. This is because, at one time, the British Empire had great influence over the world. Thus, the language spread throughout many continents.
"Latin was the world's first recorded global language, or lingua franca, carried across Western Europe by soldiers and traders in the days of the Roman Empire," says Salikoko Mufwene, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago.
Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more than eight million people in the world, both in and outside of China. Mandarin is the primary spoken form of Chinese, in contrast to the southern Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Wu.
English is the foremost—and by some accounts the only—world language. Beyond that, there is no academic consensus about which languages qualify; Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish are other possible world languages. Some authors consider Latin to have formerly been a world language.
Because of America's dominance over cinema, television, popular music, trade, and technology (including the Internet) throughout the years, it made English even more universal! Today, English has become the leading language in business, science, literature, politics, diplomacy and many more areas and industries.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Esperanto (/ˌɛspəˈrɑːntoʊ/ or /ˌɛspəˈræntoʊ/) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L.
According to Ethnologue, Chinese (and all of its varieties such as Mandarin and Wu) is by far the most spoken language across the world with 1.31 billion speakers. That's approximately 16 percent of the world's population.
Mandarin Chinese is known as 普通话 (Pǔtōnghuà), the “common speech,” and it has only been the official language of China since the 1930s, when the country established it as the standard dialect and began pushing to make this a reality nationwide.
How Many Languages Are Spoken In China? In a population of roughly 1.4 billion, China has 302 individual living languages. To put that in perspective globally, an astonishing 20 percent of the world's population speaks a Chinese language natively.
The Chinese language has a unique structure and pronunciation system that is vastly different from English. Chinese is made up of tens of thousands of characters, each with its own meaning, and often multiple pronunciations. This makes the language extremely difficult to learn, especially for non-native speakers.
Mandarin Chinese
Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else) accustomed to the Latin alphabet.
Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. Its writing system is an abjad, which functions very differently from both Chinese characters and the English alphabet because it uses letters to represent consonants but not all vowels, and it uses a cursive script, so letters combine and change forms.
English speaking countries
English is an official language in 41 countries and is partly spoken as a mother tongue in 18 other countries. The English language has its roots in the Indo-European language family. With 272.48 million native speakers, English has the highest prevalence in the United States of America.
English is flexible and easy to learn
It is a huge entity of vocabulary and is constantly absorbing new words, whilst at the same time seeping into foreign languages. English contains over 750,000 words. With so many different words available to describe things, you should never be short of synonyms.
Speaking Spanish also opens up more opportunities for travel and immersion outside of your home, from Central and South America, to Europe. Mandarin however, is limited to China, which for many can be quite far away for traveling. Perhaps more importantly, retaining your knowledge for Spanish will be much easier.
It takes about 4-7 years (roughly 2200 to 4000 hours) to become fluent in every aspect of the language, if you spend at least an hour and a half to study every day. However, it's quite common for learners to become more fluent in some areas than others depending on how they allotted their study time.