However, when taking into account the demographic trends up to 2050, as established by the United Nations, the result is very different. Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, and Indonesian will dominate much of the business world by 2050, followed by Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Russian.
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.
Mandarin. Mandarin is likely to be the most spoken language in 2050 because of its vast number of speakers.
“English is likely to remain one of the world's most important languages for the foreseeable future, but its future is more problematic — and complex — than most people appreciate,” said language researcher David Graddol.
Python. Python can be regarded as the future of programming languages. As per the latest statistics, Python is the main coding language for around 80% of developers. The presence of extensive libraries in Python facilitates artificial intelligence, data science, and machine learning processes.
Of course, the world is constantly changing, and a new study has proclaimed that there will soon be a new global language on the world scene. Dr. Jeffrey Gill, a Flinders University academic, believes Chinese is set to rise shortly as a prominent global language spoken frequently outside of China and Asia.
English aside, which language has grown fastest over the past 10, 50 and 100 years in terms of speaker numbers? The answer for all three periods is Mandarin Chinese.
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.
“English is likely to remain one of the world's most important languages for the foreseeable future, but its future is more problematic — and complex — than most people appreciate,” said language researcher David Graddol.
Of course, the world is constantly changing, and a new study has proclaimed that there will soon be a new global language on the world scene. Dr. Jeffrey Gill, a Flinders University academic, believes Chinese is set to rise shortly as a prominent global language spoken frequently outside of China and Asia.
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.
Portuguese is not a dying language. It is the main language used on a day-to-day basis by more than two hundred million people on three continents, and is widely used as a minority or second language by millions of people beyond these hearths.
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.
Could this eventually happen? Yes, sure! Especially if the world changes dramatically. But for the foreseeable future, it seems unlikely that another language will spread like a growing wave that eventually topples English, simply because English is already widely in use, with no new major geography to cover.
For the foreseeable future English will remain the dominant global lingua franca (a language used by people with different native languages to communicate with each other), but the role it plays in the lives of individuals or in policies will begin to change.
Language is always changing, evolving, and adapting to the needs of its users. This isn't a bad thing; if English hadn't changed since, say, 1950, we wouldn't have words to refer to modems, fax machines, or cable TV. As long as the needs of language users continue to change, so will the language.
The number of Chinese speakers online is estimated at 888.4 million, which has risen an astounding 2600% over the same time period. The Chinese language is catching up quickly and is set to overtake English in the near future.
Some people consider that the English language has become a threat to the other languages. The supremacy of English in today's world cannot be denied. It is at the heart of business relationships and the vector of the world culture. English is everywhere, even in foreign languages through new words.
English as a global lingua franca cannot be said to be a threat to multilingual communication and translation. Juliane House is professor emerita of Applied Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and a founding member of the German Science Foundation's Research Centre on Multilingualism.
The percentage of native speakers of English is declining, from nearly 9 percent of the world's population in 1950 to a projected 5 percent in 2050, Graddol wrote.
It will argue that Mandarin will be cemented as the lingua franca within China in the near future, it may compete with but not surpass English as a lingua franca in the East Asian cultural region and, finally, is unlikely to become a worldwide lingua franca.