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Another initiative is the Rosetta Project, a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build an open-access digital library of human languages. The collection contains around 100,000 pages of documents and recordings for more than 2,500 languages microscopically etched on nickel disks for long-term storage.
Which is probably why billions of people are trying to learn a second language. Of those, around 150 million are using the free language-learning app Duolingo. The app only covers 23 languages, but this map provides a snapshot of the most popular.
“Even a one-week intensive language course improved attention and this effect remained stable nine months later in those who practised five hours a week or more,” say Thomas Bak, reader in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and Dina Mehmedbegovic, lecturer in Education at UCL, in a paper on the value of linguistic diversity.
Table 2 lists the 10 most powerful languages according to the PLI. English is by far the most powerful language. It is the dominant language of three G7 nations (USA, UK and Canada), and British legacy has given it a global footprint. It is the world’s lingua franca. Mandarin, which ranks second, is only half as potent.
Dutch, the language of the colonizers, is the other official language. Although it is spoken by just 6% of the population as a mother tongue, it is the sole language of government and is the primary language of instruction at school. Given its geography, Spanish also functions as a key means of interaction on the island.
The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971, and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is tied to no political, partisan or national interests.
If researching a global language network shows one thing, it's that English remains the number one most connected language in the world. After English, however, there was no single global network, but rather three sets of smaller networks around the world, linked together by languages that have had historical and colonial influence, such as ...
Lonely languages Speaking a language can be a lonely business. There are over 1,000 languages with between 100 and 999 speakers, more than 300 with between 10 and 99, and 114 with nine speakers or less.
The global role English plays today as a . lingua franca – used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages – has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe. Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome.
Since 2013, the numbers of studying a language at GCSE level – the end of secondary schooling examination taken by most 16-year-olds in England, Wales and Northern Ireland - have fallen between 30% and 50%. Scotland has its own exam system but the drop off in language study is comparable.