What are the top three most useful languages for business after English? Surprisingly, Spanish didn't make the cut despite being the official language of 20 countries and spoken by over 329 million people, according to Bloomberg Rankings.
Although many counselors in high schools, colleges, and universities are still advising students to take Spanish, it's clear that languages like German, Russian, and others are more practical in the economy.
To create the list, Bloomberg Rankings identified the 25 languages with the greatest number of native speakers, then narrowed the list to the 11 official languages of G20 countries, excluding those that designated English.
Bloomberg's methods are but one of several possible ways of analyzing why German is more useful than Spanish. Instead of variables like total number of speakers and which countries have identified a given language as their official language, one could also look at factors like total dollar volume of import and export, number of patents filed, or technical papers published in a given language. In addition, one could review the number of contracts written in a language, or the number of internet transactions in a language.
Bloomberg notes their list differs from the top foreign languages studied in U.S. colleges in 2009 from the Modern Language Association, published in December 2010.
Spanish topped that list with 864, 986 enrollments, dwarfing French which followed next with 216, 419 (no. 2), German (no. 3), American Sign Language (no. 4), Italian (no. 5), Japanese (no. 6), Chinese (no. 7), Arabic (no. 8), Latin (no. 9) and Russian (no. 10).
Sadly, many educational institutions remain out of step with the global market: if Spanish is not very useful for doing business or technical research, we need to have our students studying other languages.
