The Evolution of English

@Stephie i certainly do not advocate the learning of Mandarin before English - which, in its many forms, is close to qualifying as a universal second language... this is as much to do with the subject areas it covers as it is with numbers of speakers.

but politically and in trade terms, Mandarin wiuld be third. Arabic fourth, for security reasons. after that, Hindi? or the languages of Nigeria, forecast to have the greatest population growth for a substantial par of this century?

i an sure there are other contenders... Spanish, as the second/first language of the USA?

@Yulianna And yet, somehow, I chose French, German, and Russian! 🤦‍♀

@Yulianna If you know English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, and Japanese, I think you're essentially set.

@Yulianna I have been watching closely those various languages because of my interest in linguistics.

For simplification purposes, I believe that Spanish may be a serious contender after English to become a large trade language, not because of the size of the world population speaking it but rather because of the simplicity of learning it. It has a lot of common rules with French and Portuguese, since both have a Latin origin.

Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic and even Russian and Greek have alphabets that are too complicated to master and I don't even talk about grammar.

While China, India and Nigeria represent a very large population pool, none of those languages are expected to be dominating the trade, at least not in the coming 2 generations.

@Stephie yes, i do understand and, largely, agree with your points about trade... however, in my field of specialisation, we must also take account of security threats, direct and indirect, as well as migration push/pull factors.

i think you would consider my native language, Ukrainian, pretty weird, in that it uses the Cyrillic alphabet. 🤗

@Yulianna Notwithstanding security issues, which I fully understand in your case, I can see your point in terms of security.

I have studied the Russian and Greek languages briefly and for a short while and I am familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. However, I would be unable to hold a conversation.

I am aware that there are similarities between the Ukrainian and Russian just as there are a lot of similarities between the Korean and Chinese language as part of their grammar structure.

@Stephie I think Spanish and Portuguese are more analogous to Russian and Ukrainian in terms of the similarity of structure, etc.

@Stephie yes, neighbouring languages often have wide similarities.

from your studies, can you say anything about the purported similarities between Finnish and Hungarian?

@sarabee1995 yes, this thought did cross my mind...

@Yulianna Funny that you might address Hungarian. I do speak a few words of Hungarian and my latest travel to Budapest a few weeks ago reminded me that the language is awfully difficult to speak properly and to understand, just like Finnish.

I do not speak a single word of Finnish but both languages share some common grammatical similarities because they apply suffixes to the words, just like Russian does. Sorry but I don't speak Ukrainian but I would assume that the grammatical structure is similar to Russian, thus to Hungarian, Finnish or Korean, a so-called agglutinative language.

I do remember a word I learned in Russian, the word "table" (стол). By the table would translate "за столом" and on the table would be "на столе".

I don't have the pretension to want to teach you anything. It was purely an observation.

During my last vacation, my travels also took me to Bulgaria. The language is also written it Cyrillic letters yet it shares little in common with Russian in terms of a complex case system. I could however decipher a word or 2.