Comments on: 10 Most Influential Languages in the World

By: Andre

Andre — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 02:23:38 +0000

Thanks for the info. I see on the author’s original page he made a note that the Romans in 100 A.D. thought Latin will forever survive in some part of the world. Looking at the list of languages, it will! English has over 500 Latin words or phrases (mostly via French), French, Spanish and Portuguese are all Romance languages !

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 10:53:45 +0000

Thanks

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 10:53:08 +0000

Hello Mark ! I love you !

By: mark michaud

mark michaud — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 10:52:42 +0000

thx !

By: Manny

Manny — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:02:42 +0000

Thank you for pointing that out, Ramon. We will surely edit the post to reflect the facts!

By: Ramon

Ramon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:57:52 +0000

“If a client requests we translate Brazilian Portuguese into Japanese, it’s going to be difficult to find a linguist who is fluent in both of those languages, regardless of where in the world we look. Instead, it’s more likely we would translate from Portuguese into English, and from English into Japanese.”

I just think this is a big mistake from the author. Brazil (specifically the state of São Paulo) has perhaps the largest Japanese descendant population in the world. It’s estimated that in the Metro region of the city of São Paulo itself, there are about 1 million descendants; making it the city with the largest Japanese speakers outside of Japan.

By: Michelle K. Gross

Michelle K. Gross — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:39:35 +0000

Here is a link with Ethnologue break-downs that recognizes the distinction bet dialects of Arabic and dialects of Chinese:
http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_1.htm

By: Michelle K. Gross

Michelle K. Gross — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:32:54 +0000

Since when are vanilla Arabic and Chinese spoken languages?

Each has dialects, which are not considered to be mutually intelligible.

Perhaps the author meant that people speak MSA and Mandarin in the top 10 most common languages. But then why say “primary speaker,” when MSA is not spoken as a native language?
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