Exploring Interesting Languages to Learn in a Globalized World
In today's interconnected world, knowing more than one language is increasingly valuable. Companies operate globally, and the demand for multilingual individuals is high. Learning a new language can enhance both your personal and professional life, opening doors to cultural exchange, improving communication skills, and boosting career prospects. But with so many languages to choose from, how do you decide which one to learn? This article explores various factors to consider when selecting a language and highlights some interesting options, from widely spoken global languages to those with unique cultural appeal.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Language
Choosing a language to learn is an exciting step in your language learning journey. To make an informed decision, consider the following factors:
Personal Interest: What cultures and countries fascinate you? Do you have a favorite foreign film or cuisine? Your passion for a particular culture can fuel your motivation and make the learning process more enjoyable.
Practicality: Consider how useful the language will be in your personal and professional life. Are you planning to travel or work in a specific country? The more practical applications a language has for you, the more valuable it will be.
Number of Speakers: Unsurprisingly, it is very important to know how many speakers there are of a language before you set your heart on learning it. Most people opt to learn languages spoken by the largest number of people. You should also consider how many people speak the language as a second language.
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Versatility: When choosing a language, you may want to look at versatility. Mainly, can you use this language both at home and abroad? What about in both business and social contexts?
Learning Resources: Check the availability of learning resources such as language schools, online courses, textbooks, and language partners.
Difficulty Level: Be honest with yourself about how much time and effort you’re willing to invest. Some languages are more challenging than others for native English speakers due to differences in pronunciation, grammar, and writing systems.
To get a feel for different languages, immerse yourself in them a bit. Watch movies, listen to music, or try out a few language learning apps to see which one clicks with you. Trust your instincts, follow your interests, and most importantly, have fun with it!
Global Languages with Widespread Influence
Several languages stand out due to their widespread use and influence in business, technology, and diplomacy. Mastering these languages can open doors to international communication, enhance career prospects, and deepen cultural understanding across various fields.
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English: English remains one of the most essential languages to learn. It is the dominant language in global business, international travel, diplomatic relations, and technology. English also boasts the highest number of second-language speakers, with nearly a billion non-native speakers worldwide. Possessing a wealth of adopted words, English is an incredibly expressive, varied and flexible language. It’s the language of global pop culture and heavily influenced by it, and it loves taking up trendy words and making them “official” (think selfie, bromance, frankenfood, and totes). Plus, as it’s such a widely spoken language (an estimated 1-1.6 billion people speak it), you’ll have loads of opportunities to put these fresh new words into practice before all those non-English speakers can!
Mandarin Chinese: Mandarin Chinese tops the list of most commonly spoken native languages with 1.138 billion native speakers. While most speakers are located within China, its economic influence makes it one of the most important languages to learn. Within the Chinese language, there are several dialects, including Cantonese and Mandarin. Mandarin is the most commonly used dialect.
Spanish: Spanish has a large number of native speakers, and a large number of overall speakers as well. With over 500 million people in the world speaking Spanish, it is a useful skill to develop. Most Spanish speaking countries are located in South and Central America, which are extremely popular travel destinations in recent years. For this reason, you will find many across the world who speak Spanish. Spanish is really entertaining to learn, especially in your first few classes when your mind will be filled with images of Speedy Gonzales, Puss in Boots, Dora the Explorer and other Latino or Spanish characters. As an added bonus, Spanish is also a delicious language to pronounce and provides a lot of laughs when mastering its rolled “rs”.
Arabic: Arabic started as a nomadic language, spoken between moving tribes. Today it is the official language of the Arab League, consisting of 22 countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. These popular travel destinations make it worthwhile to learn Arabic. Not just that, it is the language of the entire Muslim civilization and all of its texts. Arabic is also a popular second language. Arabic is spoken in various countries and cities throughout the world. Of course, some different dialects and accents may make it difficult to understand depending on where you are, but it’s a valuable language to learn. Generally, Arabic is spoken in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Regional Languages with Economic and Cultural Significance
In addition to global languages, certain regional languages hold significant economic and cultural importance:
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German: Germany is the most widely spoken language throughout Europe, as Germany remains Europe’s most dominant economy. For this reason, if you do business or plan to do business in Europe, German is one of the most important languages to learn. It’s a funny language to learn, with endings tacked on to words to give them specific meanings. When learning German, you’ll likely be surprised by its long words. However, once you break them down you’ll find that they’re made up of component parts and many are amusingly untranslatable in English. Try Schadenfreude (a feeling of happiness at the misfortune of others), Fernweh (homesickness for a place you’ve never been to) or Verschlimmbessern (trying to improve something and making it worse in the process). Since the Cold War, Berlin has been the center of German cool, with clubs, musicians and art people flock to from around the world.
French: French, also called the language of love, was actually the international, diplomatic language for centuries. Only recently, historically speaking, with the rise of the United States as a global power, did English prevail as the language of diplomacy. Paris, the capital of France, is known as “the city of love.” This idea of romance extends to the French language as well. France has for a long time been a place for cool people to visit. Whether it’s the 1920s with Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, or the 2020s with Lily-Rose Depp and David Beckham, artists and other kinds of international superstars have long made Paris one of their homes.
Russian: Russian is an extremely influential language among many Eastern European and Europeasian countries. The Russian language also has the second highest percentage of internet content (following English), and the leading percent of internet content in Europe. Russian is a great language to learn, though it may seem intimidating at first. However, if you are interested in politics, global affairs, and history, learning the Russian language is a great option. Another option is to learn enough Russian that you can read classic literature in the original language! A little less than half of all web content is written in Russian!
Portuguese: Portuguese is spoken all over the world - it is the official language of countries in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa. If that wasn’t enough to prove that this language is one of the most important languages to learn, here’s more: Brazil is emerging as one of the world’s newest economic powerhouses. The native language of Brazil is Portuguese, an effect of colonizers in the area from Portugal. This is due to the rapidly growing economy of Brazil. Sports fans rejoice! Portuguese is a cool language to learn if you are interested in soccer (or football). This language is known for being spoken in Portugal and Brazil, which are two countries known for their intense love of the sport. Along with the country’s hip-swinging music and sun-splashed beaches, Brazilian Portuguese’s adorable-sounding diminutives (“inha”/”inho”) and bouncing rhythm (spoken with the locals’ characteristic playful cheek!) really make it stand out from its European counterpart. Bonus point? Speaking the local language (with that Brazilian twang!) will give you a definite edge when mingling with locals on your mandatory visit this beautiful country.
Hindi: With some of the highest numbers of speakers in the world, Hindi is one of the most important languages to learn without a doubt. But like with other languages, it’s not just the sheer number of speakers that should entice you to learn the language, but the global power of where the language comes from.
Japanese: While the Japanese language is not spoken widely outside of Japan, it’s still an important one to know. Whether you want to travel in Japan, love the culture and food, or the technology, knowing Japanese can get you far in many ways. It’s also an excellent introduction to other Asian languages. For the past few decades, Japan has been competing with the United States for cultural influence, with some of its major exports being anime and manga. When learning Japanese, you’ll be struck by its garaigo (borrowed words) usually written in the “katakana” character system. These are Western words now incorporated into everyday language - think apo (appointment), arubui (RV), baiku (bike) - and often seem so appropriate you’re bound to get a kick out of using them!
Italian: Italy is steeped in arts, culture, and history. Many world heritage sites are located in Italy, and many historical texts are written in Italian. This country is a popular travel destination, and knowing Italian will help you on a trip. One of the best words ever invented related to the concept of cool comes from Italian: sprezzatura, which Merriam-Webster defines as a “studied nonchalance.” It’s no surprise then that Italian should also make its way onto this list. Perhaps one of its biggest cool factors is Italian music, which has been setting an international standard for hundreds of years from Vivaldi to today. Ahhh, the language of love. We know you’ve imagined yourself conversing in Italian while strolling Rome’s cobbled streets, zipping about on a Vespa or up to your elbows in authentic pizza. It’s true: a love for Italian art and food has firmly entrenched the language in our collective psyche - and it shows no sign of losing popularity.
Korean: At the very beginning, we said languages are not like other trends, but if there is one language currently riding the wave of a trend it’s Korean. With K-Pop becoming one of the most popular genres of music around the world and K-Dramas popping up on streaming platforms, people around the world are becoming inspired to study Korean. South Korean popular culture has gone global in its popularity! Whether it’s the smooth dance moves and catchy songs from K-pop boy bands or the melodramatic storylines in the K-dramas, fans worldwide are hooked. The Korean language is an interesting one to learn, as its characters are phonological: the shapes are similar to the shape of your mouth as you make the sound.
"Cool" Languages and Their Cultural Appeal
Coolness is entirely subjective, and its definition changes over time. The biggest factor for how cool a language seems is how cool the people who speak it seem. Movies and music can have a huge effect on a language’s reputation. Here are a few languages that have been identified as "cool" due to their cultural cachet:
Korean: As mentioned above, the rise of K-Pop and K-Dramas has made Korean a popular and "cool" language to learn.
Spanish: In the realms of movies and music, it’s hard to beat Spanish’s climb right now, with artists like Bad Bunny becoming internationally popular.
French: France has long been associated with art, fashion, and culture, making French a language with enduring appeal.
Italian: Italian's association with art, music, and cuisine contributes to its "cool" factor.
German: The resurgence of Berlin as a cultural center has boosted the appeal of the German language.
!Xhosa: This language spoken in parts of South Africa and Zimbabwe makes the list because of one of its most interesting phonetic features: clicks. These are sounds made using the tongue that sound like, well, a click. !Xhosa isn’t the only language that features these - in fact, other languages can produce a wider range of clicks - but it’s one of the most spoken.
Afrikaans: While Afrikaans is hardly brand new - it developed from Dutch contact with other languages in Africa during the 18th century - it’s one of the newestlanguages in the world.
Programming Languages
Smalltalk: I played with Pharo Smalltalk for a bit and enjoyed the experience very much. Pharo is image-based, which will probably surprise you - very few PLs share this characteristic. Pharo includes an IDE within the image, including incredibly powerful debugger; the look&feel is not "native" to your system, as it's built from scratch, but it's not ugly either; the upside of using Morphic as a base for GUI makes it flexible, so much so that only the Web (with browser developer tools) comes close to it. Overall it's an eye-opening experience which will show you how incredibly user (the tinkerer kind) unfriendly basically every GUI currently in use is.
Prolog
J is an array language by Ken Iverson, it's general-purpose with heavy emphasis on expressing complex data transformations succinctly. The core of the language is not that big, its rules are simple, but they combine in a way you won't see anywhere else. Worth taking a look; one important note, though: it'll take you years to become able to read J code on your own, so in the beginning don't even try - the trick is to use the interpreter, which has 3 or 4 different ways of displaying expressions to make them more manageable, but in the end you're going to execute and experiment for hours before understanding a single line of J. That's normal. Don't be discouraged. That line probably expresses computation that would need hundreds of lines in "normal" language.
Forth: it's basically a REPL for Assembly. It's interactive, lets you define and execute programs by typing them at the prompt, yet it's usable on the most underpowered microcontrollers out there. See the (free) book "Thinking Forth" by Leo Brodie, it's a good overview. Also, personal note: don't try to do everything via the stack: it's perfectly ok to use named variables. Especially since you can implement the support for them yourself (or fetch one from the net) in case your chosen implementation doesn't provide them.
OCaml: F# can be viewed as a dialect of OCaml, but, due to it having to fit into .NET, F# left out the 'O' from OCaml. While the ML base of OCaml is solid, it's not that unusual (well, if you have experience with other languages in that family…); it OOP part, though, is a real gem, and from the looks of it it was a major influence on Scala OO features. F# also left out functors, IIRC, which are also an interesting feature. Also, after you learn OCaml, you'll be able to learn F# in a weekend, so it's hitting two birds with one stone.
Elixir and Erlang. Depending on what you want out of it, I'd start with Erlang and then learn Elixir after that. That is because Erlang is a very simple language, with no "magic" at all: whatever's happenning is in plain sight, visible in the source. Of course, it's tedious and verbose as a result, but considering that the OTP is damn hard to really grok, having a simple language actually helps a lot. Once you have Erlang/OTP basics down, transition to Elixir, which adds a convenient syntactic abstraction in the form of macros and a more complex/powerful module system.
Nim: I like it personally, but I'd wait a bit before delving into it. As far as I understand, the parts around the GC are being redesigned, and from the looks of it the new design will be rather different than the current one (also better, IMO). Other than that, I use Nim regularly for writing simple scripts, which are not much longer than Python or PERL equivalent, yet they are statically linked executables with excellent performance and ability to be dropped on any of my systems where there's libc.
Haxe + LuaJIT: this is what I'm currently investigating. There's a lot to like about Lua, but lack of static (even if optional) typing, the module system design, and non-existent stdlib are a huge pain points. Haxe is a language which compiles down to Lua (among 9 other targets) and it covers all the problems, leaving you with the incredible speed and other goodies (like proper tail calls) ready to use. The Haxe compiler performs dead code elimination, so you only pay (in terms of the lenght of produced Lua code) for what you use. Finally, Haxe has proper macros, a bit similar to those in Nim, but with additional layer of sugar, similar to syntax-case from Scheme. BTW: Haxe compiler is written in OCaml, so it won't hurt to know it beforehand (not a strict requirement, though, unless you want to write comipiler plugins.)
Common Lisp, Clojure, Racket: I'm running out of time for writing this post, but these all have many good things going for them. Personally, I started with Racket, then learned CL, and only later I learned Clojure, which required JVM to run. I didn't like that last part. ClojureScript is now a serious contender, as it became bootstraped and can work with JS engine alone.
Scala: honorary mention, being tied to JVM is not that bad in its case, and it is actually quite well designed langauge. Of course, the chains of implicits or higher-kinded types are hard to grasp, but you don't need them in the beginning, and by the time you need them, you'll be able to understand them, probably.
The Fun Side of Language Learning
There’s absolutely no reason for why learning a language should be boring. Sure, if fluency is your goal all languages require dedication and commitment, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have fun in the process. Whether your chosen language’s vocabulary amuses you, or its pronunciation ties your tongue in knots, there’s always a lighter side to learning a new language.
English: Possessing a wealth of adopted words, English is an incredibly expressive, varied and flexible language. It’s the language of global pop culture and heavily influenced by it, and it loves taking up trendy words and making them “official” (think selfie, bromance, frankenfood, and totes). Plus, as it’s such a widely spoken language (an estimated 1-1.6 billion people speak it), you’ll have loads of opportunities to put these fresh new words into practice before all those non-English speakers can!
Spanish: Its usefulness aside (more than 400 million people speak it natively), Spanish is really entertaining to learn, especially in your first few classes when your mind will be filled with images of Speedy Gonzales, Puss in Boots, Dora the Explorer and other Latino or Spanish characters. As an added bonus, Spanish is also a delicious language to pronounce and provides a lot of laughs when mastering its rolled “rs”.
Japanese: When learning Japanese, you’ll be struck by its garaigo (borrowed words) usually written in the “katakana” character system. These are Western words now incorporated into everyday language - think apo (appointment), arubui (RV), baiku (bike) - and often seem so appropriate you’re bound to get a kick out of using them!
Brazilian Portuguese: Along with the country’s hip-swinging music and sun-splashed beaches, Brazilian Portuguese’s adorable-sounding diminutives (“inha”/”inho”) and bouncing rhythm (spoken with the locals’ characteristic playful cheek!) really make it stand out from its European counterpart. Bonus point? Speaking the local language (with that Brazilian twang!) will give you a definite edge when mingling with locals on your mandatory visit this beautiful country.
Turkish: You might be surprised to hear that Turkish sports a number of loan words - particularly from French - and that its grammar is relatively logical. Intrigued? The fun really starts when learning to read and write phonetically using Latin script, and memorizing Turkish sounds given to recognizable characters. (For example, a Turkish “c” is pronounced like an English “j” as in “jam”.)
German: When learning German, you’ll likely be surprised by its long words. However, once you break them down you’ll find that they’re made up of component parts and many are amusingly untranslatable in English. Try Schadenfreude (a feeling of happiness at the misfortune of others), Fernweh (homesickness for a place you’ve never been to) or Verschlimmbessern (trying to improve something and making it worse in the process).
Quechua: Fancy learning the language of the Incas? Yes, this might seem a little random, but what’s more fun than learning a rare language that will make your travel experience THAT much better? If you’re planning on ever traveling through Andean Peru, Ecuador or Bolivia, locals will give you major kudos for making the extra linguistic effort and branching out from Spanish (also spoken there). Thankfully, it’s actually really easy (and fun!) to master the basics - leaving you time to gear up for Quechua’s more complex advanced grammar.
Chinese: While Chinese grammar is actually simpler than many other languages, the real fun begins when learning to speak Chinese. Chinese is a tonal language (in its case, with four tones), meaning that a single sound can be pronounced in four different ways - yep, with four different meanings!
Benefits of Learning a New Language
Learning a new language can improve cognitive skills like memory, problem-solving, and multitasking. It can better your career opportunities, improve global communication, and enrich your cultural experiences through deeper connections with others. Being multilingual can significantly boost your earning potential. Additionally, these employees often earn about 19% more than those who speak only one language. Globalization is on the rise, and our world is always growing smaller. Those in-demand jobs may expect applicants to know at least two languages - especially if companies work across global teams or with foreign business partners.
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