Comments on: how many people speak a second language?

By: Nicholas Miller

Nicholas Miller — Sat, 30 Jan 2016 19:30:25 +0000

I would say that an important demographic missed out here would be the number of people living in countries made through colonisation. In Paraguay, for example, about 85% of the country speak both Spanish and the indigenous language of Guaraní. This is exceptional in the region, but there are still a significant population who speak indigenous mother tongues and then Spanish or Portuguese (Quechua, the most spoken with about 9 million, itself comes from being the Incan language, where it quite possibly was once a lingua franca). Then there’s Hindi in India, Urdu in Pakistan, multilingualism in Afghanistan, Swahili in Uganda, DRC etc. So maybe it’s all these that bring up the total to past 50%?

By: Seba

Seba — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 17:03:40 +0000

Hi Sarah, and thanks for your comment! Yes, apparently this might well be true… but I have been trying to get my head around this for a while in terms of how can one know…

Still, none of the sources mentioned here says much else than that “it so”… Im afraid the Center for Applied Linguistics that you linked doesn’t report on what you quoted, but a Tucker, G. Richard does –though without any sources. Your second and third links takes me to what it looks like a Japanese cell phone shop… Oh well. Thanks anyway! (the closest thing I’ve found is about Europe, and yes, half of them do speak a 2nd language http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf )

By: sarah

sarah — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 16:36:02 +0000

Hi, I’m Sarah Allen, one of the founders of Mightyverse, and I wrote this blog post. I haven’t seen any updated studies, though I did move my update to the top of the post to clarify that, from what I’ve read, I now believe that a majority of the world speaks at least two languages.

By: Seba

Seba — Sat, 19 Jul 2014 16:45:21 +0000

No idea who wrote this entry but I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, but couldnt find anyone/any place that can provide data on the number of second language speakers… even though ones reads everywhere that “most of the world is multilingual/speaks a second language.” I suspect something along the same lines you mentioned here -do you have any updates on this? Thanks!

By: Programming should be taught in schools like a language | Web coding tutorials

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:33:07 +0000

[…] After watching it can be seen that to some people who may never need to programme something in their entire lifetime having the ability to move into that threshold and be able to programme allows for people to have the versatility to move into more professions than they would have had open before. In the UK modern foreign languages are taught in school from a young age allowing children the ability to ‘hold their own’ when encountered with a person speaking the language that they have learnt. Despite walking out of the school building with the qualification in your hand the worlds population only has a measly 8.3% speaking a second language. (/2010/10/how-many-people-speak-a-second-language/comment-page-1/). […]

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 07:47:12 +0000

Hi Steven — thanks for pointing out the wikipedia article and reference. I’ve added an update to the article with my thoughts and additional references.

By: Steven

Steven — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 06:08:32 +0000

Er .. If you search “multilingualism” on wikipedia it says that multilingual speakers outnumber the monolingual speakers in the world so .. who’s wrong ?