If I remember right, the most understood languages in the world are Mandarin, Spanish, and English, in that order, though I could easily be wrong.
That’s not my question, though. Taking as our sample all people that have *ever * lived, is it possible to say what the most understood languages up until now has been? I imagine for one that Latin would jump up a good few places.
I’d still say Mandarin. The current total is staggering, and the language, while evolving, has remained fairly intact for a long time. Sure, if you go back more than a few dozen years, the number of people who actually spoke Mandarin (as opposed as some other dialect) gets smaller and smaller, but I still think it’s #1.
If you count English as a second language (with a reasonable standard of fluency), it may surpass Mandarin at some point since the numbers of people studying (or have studied) it today dwarf the population of the Earth even not so long ago. If the Chinese can get it so that more than a tiny fraction of their population who study English can actually speak it, then there ya go.
Surely it would be a current language, as the world’s population has exploded astronomically in the last 250 years.
You need to define your terms a bit more. What do you mean by “most understood” – largest number of people, or highest percentage of the world population?
Because if you are going by percentage, I think that Roman Empire under Hadrian ~120 AD covered a large part of the world (most of Britain, Europe, Asia, the Mideast, and northern Africa), and at least some Latin and Greek would have been understood by most of those people.
For total native speakers, Chinese.
For “language that’s been spoken fluently by a higher % of whatever the population of the world was at the time, along time” (now that’s one cute integral), that’s where you’d have to toss a coin between Latin and Chinese.
Actually, I don’t think Latin ranks that high on the list. I remember reading that at the height of its power, the Roman Empire had a population of about 80 million - and most of them were subjugated people which did not speak or understand Latin, except for the higher classes (Administrative staff etc.). It’s true that Latin was the international language of scholarship many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire; but the percentage of the population which had access to formal education requiring fluency of Latin was slim. And don’t remember that all the time while Latin was flourishing in Europe, there were the Chinese, thousands of miles away from Europe. FOr the question as you phrase it, I think the race is between Chinese (whatever of the Chinese dialects you regard as the representative one - is it really Mandarin?) and English, which has evolved into the global lingua franca after WW1.
If Latin was only ever the language of a tiny elite, how could it have given rise to the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian etc.) spoken by nearly everybody in those countries, even the poorest peasants? It’s clear to me that Latin must have been far more common than you think.
I did introduce the “*t” factor into the integral for that very same reason… I think the 20+ centuries of Latin beat the less-than-50-years of English (French was still the “foreign language” par excellence in quite a few countries until 20 years ago, and in some non-English-speaking countries like Brazil it’s Spanish).
Plus, what Alive At Both Ends said; for example in the early Middle Age in Spain literacy was very low, but the ability to understand and converse in Latin was well-extended (travellers in the road to Santiago used Latin). It may have been “Latin for tourists and Mass,” but it was Latin used for daily tasks.
The Romance language evolved form vulgar Latin, on which Wiki says:
Of course it’s a matter of definiton if you consider vulgar Latin the same language as classical Latin, but from what I remember from Latin classes, the Latin which was actually spoken in the streets of the empire’s cities was rather distinct from the Latin used by the classical scholars whose works have been read for two millennia. The situation was similar throughout most of the centuries afterwards, in which Latin was the language of international academia. One of the main objectives of Renaissance humanism was to cleanse the Latin which had been spoken and (mostly) written before in Europe, which had, in fact, been a very corrupted version of classical Latin. Modern Latin classes are not least the result of the works of rather recent scholars who re-established what they regarded as proper Latin, as opposed to the mumbo-jumbo which had been considered Latin before. English, OTOH, has more or less the same throughout the anglophone world since the days of Shakespeare (Yes, I know there are variations between U.S., British, and Australian accents, but these are minor compared to the various dialects of Latin throughout the millennia). I think this uniformity of English should be taken into account in favor of English.
You should also remember that even after the evolution of Romance language, regional languages stuck for a long time. It was not until the French Revolution that French really replaced rivals such as Occitan (which is also Romance, but less close to Latin than French) in many parts of France. I think this shows that even during the Roman empire, parts of the population of the provinces were happy with their indigenous languages instead of adopting Latin, or vulgar Latin, which was more prevalent in the elites.
English has had international importance for more than just 50 years. In Germany, for example, English classes were made mandatory around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, and this was the result, not the cause, of English having grown more important as a language of international commerce, at least as far as the German were concerned. It’s true that French held the first rank in many countries until recently, but I don’t think this can make up for the vast numbers of people in the world who have been speaking English. The British were more eager to spread their language among the subjects of their empire than the Romans were, and their idiom stuck instead of corrupting into a number of regional pidgin dialects, and of course there are non-native speakers who lean it as a foreign language. It hasn’t had the same time as Latin had to do so, but the percentage of the world’s population which speaks more or less proper English today is certainly higher than the percentage of the world’s population which spoke more or less proper Latin at the height of the Roman empire. Remember that China’s population dwarfed Europe’s even back then.
In the early Middle Ages though, weren’t most people in Spain speaking late Latin/proto-Spanish anyway?
Small terminological quibble: linguists don’t typically talk about languages “evolving,” since nobody has found evidence of languages improving over time. We usually just say that they “change”.
Wouldn’t some form of Indian be up there in the list pretty high. There are what…1.5 billion of them.
No, closer to 1.1B. And there really isn’t a language called “Indian”. Hindi would probably be what you’re thinking of
But India has many languages, some of which are not Indo-European. Hindi, one of the official languages, is spoken natively by less than half the population. That’s a sizable chunk to be sure, but less than 1/3 your estimate. English is commonly used as a bridge language between different linguistic groups.
Erm… are you speaking on behalf of all linguists? Because I’ve never heard of any linguist who would claim that evolution implies improvement, nor that ‘change’ means anything different from ‘evolution’.
Regarding Hindi, I should add that Urdu, the most commonly spoken language in Pakistan, is considered by many to be the same language although it is written in a form of Arabic script. That probably adds another 250M speakers (both in Pakistan and India).
No modern biologist, or scientist of any kind, would ever use evolving to mean improving. Only Creationists use that false meme.
I would think that linguists would be especially aware of that meaning of the word, accordingly.
Nope, I’m only speaking on behalf of myself and one prof: since I don’t specialize in it I only ever had to take a single seminar on historical linguistics, and the instructor became annoyed whenever someone used “evolve” when they meant “change”. His reasoning, which sounded reasonable to me, is that “evolve” carries a connotation of something getting better, where “change” doesn’t. Since the vast majority of changes that a language experiences can’t be shown to directly improve the language in any way, I always try to avoid using “evolve”.
I don’t have any experience in the area, so for all I know this could be an eccentricity of a single scholar, but it made sense to me.
Shaking head and muttering. If a linguist decides he’s going to be prescriptive, then he ought to prescribe the proper uses of words. Evolution does NOT imply improvement, nor degradation, nor anything else except change over time. It is an absolutely apt description of what happens to language over time.
And here I have to ask… how would you show that a language does improve? What would “improvement” even mean when it comes to a language? How would you even define that? Bolder vowels? Crisper consonants? Tartar control?
Oh. When you used the pronoun ‘we’ in reference to linguists, I rushed to the conclusion that you were speaking as one.
Actually, without entering into the details, even though it was indeed after the revolution, and even moreso after 1870, that it became a policy to try to eradicate other dialects, french was already quite proeminent in France before that, for various reasons, a situation that was rather atypical in Europe at this time.
Also, I don’t think that French is any closer to Latin than Occitan.
I’m not prescribing anything, I’m simply using a word as I have for years. Since English isn’t my native language there’s every chance I could be incorrect, and since it seems like this whole bout of silliness is stemming from a disagreement about what the word means, could I ask what your definition of “evolve” is?
This is exactly my point: there is no conclusive way to demonstrate improvement that I’m aware of, which is why I was reluctant to describe language change with a term that I had always thought implied improvement.
I am a linguist. I suppose I should have clarified in my last post, by “area” I meant “comparative and historical linguistics”. I’m a grad student currently working in phonetics, and my research focuses on speech production and speech perception. My program only required a single, one-semester research seminar on historical and comparative linguistics, and since I didn’t have that much interest in the field I never went beyond that.
