Although Mandarin is predicted to dominate by 2050, other Chinese languages are also predicted to thrive over the next three decades.
According to the Engco Forecasting Model explained above, the 5 most spoken languages in 2050 will be Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. The key drivers behind the continued rise in popularity of these languages include population growth, economic predictions and national language policy.
A 2014 study by the investment bank Natixis even predicted that French would become the world's most widely spoken language by 2050. The authors of the study referred to were demographic growth prospects in Africa. "French is also widespread in many smaller countries," Ammon said.
As David Graddol notes in “The Future of English?”, there is no reason to believe that another language will become the global lingua franca within the next 50 years. English probably won't replace other languages, but its usefulness as the common language in trade, diplomacy, and pop culture will continue.
According to the Engco Forecasting Model explained above, the 5 most spoken languages in 2050 will be Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. The key drivers behind the continued rise in popularity of these languages include population growth, economic predictions and national language policy.
The languages that takes the number 1 place in our list and therefore, the most spoken first language in the world is, by far, Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is only one of the many Chinese dialects spoken in China. However, it is officially considered the Official Language of the People's Republic of China.
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.
The American studies, philosophy and music expert at Columbia University, predicts that 90 per cent of languages will die out to leave around 600.
By 2050, some estimate that 90% of the currently spoken languages will have gone forever. And, rather like climate change, this isn't an inevitable erosion over time. Of the 420 language families known to have existed, a quarter have already gone – 90% of those in the past 60 years.
Since 1950, the number of unique languages spoken throughout our world has steadily declined. Today, the voices of more than 7,000 languages resound across our planet every moment, but about 2,900 or 41% are endangered. At current rates, about 90% of all languages will become extinct in the next 100 years.
What Language Will We Speak In 2030? languages will continue to play a vital role, but we can expect the proportion of Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish speakers to increase dramatically as well as those from Italian, Japanese, and Russian.
First off, the script used to write Hindi, Devanagari, is considered particularly hard to get a hang of. The script is also what's called an abugida, meaning that the individual characters represent a consonant and vowel combination, rather than a single vowel or consonant.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants.
No single language acts as a complete universal for any nation, even if the majority of a nation's population share a language. Indeed, language use changes over time, with one language being the predominant spoken form for certain generations, only to be replaced by another.
Most languages, though, die out gradually as successive generations of speakers become bilingual and then begin to lose proficiency in their traditional languages. This often happens when speakers seek to learn a more-prestigious language in order to gain social and economic advantages or to avoid discrimination.
More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, but according to a study led by the Australian National University, 1,500 of these may die out by 2100. The study, which was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, used models to predict which languages may become endangered and why.