Since the dawn of time, humans have had some form of communication between each other. In those times, humans didn’t use a language with logical sentences and letters, but they still did have some form of understanding through certain sounds and gestures. Several thousands of years needed to pass until we finally made some kind of advancement in our communication. People started forming letters and words that had a lot more meaning to them. Basic wording for things such as water or food started to be a common thing.
Many millennia later, we finally reached a level where we can easily communicate with each other. Just the idea of how advanced we have become in forming reasonable sentences is simply amazing. There are no other species on this planet that have developed such a way of communication. It is even crazier to think about this once you find out that we might be one of the youngest species on this planet.
Once tribes started to develop in much more complicated social groups, the way of communicating started to develop and split into other categories too. The people up north would start speaking in one type of language while those south in some completely different.
Sometimes, it sounds some languages are so unlike each other, it is like they’ve come from two different planets.
The fact that there are more than 6,000 languages that are used on a daily basis around the world, is a crazy idea on its own. If you want to know which ones are the most used and the most powerful, make sure you keep reading.
English
I think it is safe to say that English is the most known language on the entire planet. Sure, it doesn’t have the largest amount of native speakers, but wherever you go, you will find someone that knows how to speak English. They may not be fluent in it, but they would still be able to understand most of the basic stuff.
Studies have shown that there are more than 350 million native speakers of English. Combine these 350 million with the other 1.2 billion second-language speakers and you get a total of 1.5 billion. This number tells you just how popular English is around the planet.
Many people think that Mandarin should hold that first place of languages in the world because it has almost a billion native speakers, but the population that understands Mandarin is concentrated only in China. You won’t find people understanding Mandarin in Europe or America. This is exactly why English is believed to be such a powerful language.
Mandarin
Like we already said, Mandarin has natively spoken by almost a billion people around the planet or more accurately, in China. There are also around 200 to 300 million second-language speakers which are a pretty big number too.
What is interesting about Mandarin is the fact that it is actually a group of Chinese languages that are spoken all across China. Think of it like this. The accents of English used around the world sound different, but it is still the same thing. You hear the same thing but pronounced in a different way. It may be a bit more difficult to understand someone with an accent, but with enough effort, your mind will be able to decipher the accent. Well, the dialects used in Mandarin completely change the way some words are said and the way some sentences are formed.
A person that originates from southern China won’t be able to understand Mandarin used by someone that originates from northern China. Both of them live in China, both of them use Mandarin, but they have will have a difficult time understanding each other.
Swahili
Swahili is the official language in five different countries including Kenya, Tanzania, DR Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. However, it is used in a lot more countries located in Africa. It is recognized by millions of people on this continent. The exact number of Swahili speakers is not known, but experts estimate that it is somewhere between 120 or 150 million.
Many people would argue that Swahili shouldn’t be on this list, but I believe that it is interesting enough which is why it deserves a place on this list. The idea that you can use Swahili to get through every single country of Africa is something that you cannot do with any other language. Sure, you could move across the entire United States of America with the use of English, but that’s just one country. With Swahili, you can move through 30 different countries and people will still understand you.
These days, a lot of people have started to learn Swahili because they’ve understood just how powerful it is. If you are one of those people that understands just how important Swahili is, you can find additional information about it at KL Translations that may help you delve deeper into the science behind the language.
Spanish
Another very interesting contender on this list is Spanish. Experts believe that Spanish is spoken by almost 500 million people around the planet. It is in fact, the second most spoken native language right after Mandarin. Just 600 years ago, the only Spanish-speaking language was Spain, so the total amount of native speakers in that time was only about 8 to 9 million. But, once the Americas were starting to be explored and developed, Spanish speakers started to spread.
Today, in South America, Spanish is the official language of 20 different countries including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Spain, and many more. Because it is so easy to learn and it is such a fluent speaking language, it easily spread around the entire South American continent. This is why it deserves to be put on the same level as Mandarin or even English.
So, if you’re interested in becoming bilingual or even trilingual, you can choose any of these contenders we mentioned above. Whichever you pick, you will definitely find yourself in a situation in the future when you will have to use it.
