A MAP launched using US Intelligence service data has revealed which is the most-spoken second language of every country in the world.
This does not mean the languages most taught in the classroom, which are known in the educational community as a country's 'official second language' – even where very few adults understand or are able to use them once they finish compulsory schooling – but refers to the most-spoken native languages which are not the main national ones.
For example, although Irish Gaelic is an official language in the Republic of Ireland, English is the 'main' national tongue, insofar as all Irish natives necessarily speak and understand English even if their first, or preferred, language is Gaelic.
Naturally, Gaelic is revealed as the most-spoken second language – being second native language among the population – in Ireland, with about 40% of the country declaring it to be either their main native tongue or jointly with English.
In some countries which only have one official national tongue, or where co-official languages are regional only, the most-spoken second language is the mother tongue of the largest migrant communities.
This is the case with the UK, where, despite having several official languages – including Welsh, Cornish, Scots, and Scots Gaelic or Ghàidhlig – these are concentrated in regions, and the most-spoken native tongue other than English is Polish, owing to the large diaspora from Poland living in Britain.
It is also the case with Germany and Austria, where the largest migrant community, and German- and Austrian-born citizens with migrant parents or grandparents, is Turkish, meaning this is the second-most spoken mother tongue.
In the Americas, for example, pre-colonial languages that have survived alongside colonial tongues, and are co-official, are the most-spoken second native languages – in Perú, Ecuador and Bolivia, this is Quechua, even though Aymara is prolific in large parts of these in lesser numbers and, in Paraguay, Guaraní is almost as widely spoken as Spanish, with 46% naming it as their sole or joint native tongue and only 15.2% of Paraguayans being purely first-language Spanish-speakers.
Map of the most-spoken second languages - native tongues, that is - in Europe (this and other global language maps from MoveHub)
This is also true of several African countries, although in others, the colonial languages are actually the second native tongues, even where they are the main or only official ones – French, in Algeria, and Portuguese in Mozambique, for example.
Some land-masses within the same countries are shown separately due to their most commonly-spoken second native languages being different – such as Greenland, which is part of Denmark, but where Greenlandic, an Inuit language, is the main and one of the official tongues, with Danish, also official, as the second native language; unlike the Danish peninsula itself where English is the most-found second native tongue, a situation also found in Norway, Iceland and Sweden.
In many cases, the most prolific mother tongue other than the main national language is dictated by geography – Italian is the dominant second language in Libya, for example.
Spanish still the world's second-most spoken native language after Chinese
The CIA published the data in its World Factbook, and the figures have been turned into continent maps by MoveHub.
These easily-accessible visual aids show Spanish is the fourth-most commonly-spoken second language on earth, in eight different countries or territories, beaten only by English, French and Russian, in that order and ahead of Creole, Arabic and Kurdish.
Portuguese, Italian and Quechua make up the remainder of the top 10.
Spanish is already the official national language of 19 countries in Latin America and in the west African nation of Equatorial Guinea, and is the second-most spoken as a first language on earth and fourth outright.
Mandarin Chinese has the second-highest number of speakers (14.6% of the global population – 12.3% speak it as a first language) beaten by English, which is spoken by 16.5% of the planet; followed by Hindi (8.3% of the world), and Spanish (7% of the world).
But when considering native speakers only, Mandarin Chinese comes first at 12.3% and Spanish is second, at 6%, beating English and Arabic, each at 5.1%, Hindi at 3.5%, Bengali at 3.3% and Portuguese at 3%.
Despite its comparatively low numbers of mother-tongue speakers, English is the most-spoken language on earth, as it has the peculiarity of being one of the few tongues in the world with more non-native than native users; French is similar, not figuring at all in the top 11 first languages but the fifth-most spoken on earth, with 3.6% of the planet being French-speakers including those who have learned it as a non-mother tongue.
Other dominant languages on earth are Russian, spoken by 3.4%, and the native language of 2.1% of the planet; Japanese, the first language of 1.7% of the world; Indonesian, spoken by 2.6%, a high percentage of whom are non-native speakers or who consider it one of two or more of their mother tongues; Western Punjabi, with 1.3% of the world being first-language speakers, and Javanese, whose mother-tongue speakers total 1.1% of the earth's headcount.
The six languages of the United Nations – Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish – are the mother tongues or second languages of around 45% of the earth's population and are official languages, solely or jointly, in over half the countries in the world.
Where is Spanish the second-most spoken native tongue?
English does not feature much as a second language in South America, other than in Surinam and Chile, but Spanish is the most-spoken second language in Brazil.
The USA is currently one of the top-three countries with the largest native Spanish-speaking population on the planet – despite the only official language in the United States, in the 32 out of 50 States which have one at all, being English, with the exception of regional tongues in Hawaii and Alaska.
Well over 50 million mother-tongue Spanish-speakers live in the USA, or more than the entire population of Spain itself, and beaten only by Colombia and México.
Other countries where Spanish is the most widely-spoken second language include the Caribbean island of Aruba, where the official tongues are Dutch and Papiamento, the latter being a creole tongue made up of a mix of Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, English, and with minor influences of French, Arawak and a number of African languages; Papiamento is the first language of 69.4% of the country but Dutch of only 6.1%, and 13.7% of inhabitants have Spanish as a first language...
Read full article at thinkSPAIN.com