I Want You To Speak English

Almost half of the world’s population claim one of only ten languages as their mother tongue. So who’s in the top ten? You might be surprised. Determining which languages are spoken most in the world is a more difficult task than you might imagine. We can say with some confidence that Mandarin, English, Spanish and Arabic will make an appearance, and roughly in what order. But there are some surprises too. Would you have guessed that Bengali is in the top ten? One small caveat: assigning hard data, in the form of “X million native speakers,” to any of these languages is practically impossible. What constitutes a language, a dialect, or a subdialect, is highly contested. And even when linguists do agree on a category, how similar is the English spoken in the Scottish Highlands to the English spoken in Baltimore’s city center? Yet at least two speakers from these regions would be able to communicate, in some...