Which language does every country want to learn?

Uno? Deux? 셋? How many languages did you learn during a lockdown?

Learning a new language is a challenge that many people have taken on over the past year.

Teaching yourself to speak a foreign language while airports were closed may seem loco. But learning a new language gives a taste of another culture, keeps your brain active and healthy, and helps you think and see in new ways.

But what languages are individuals in different countries most interested in learning?

This new study from WordTips digs into Google search data to uncover which language each country is most interested in learning.

WordTips compiled a list of the top 50 most spoken languages based on their previous article ‘The 100 Most-Spoken Languages in the World.’
Then the WordTips team translated the following phrases into 119 languages:
● [Language Name] language (e.g. “English language”);
● Study Language Name;
● Learn Language Name

Then the team used Ahrefs to identify monthly Google search volumes of those phrases translated to one of the country’s official or widely used languages. Then WordTips summed up the monthly search volumes of the phrases and found out the two most popular languages in every country.

Finally, they enriched the study’s data with the number of internet users and calculated the number of yearly searches per 1000 internet users. The data was collected in May 2021.

The most sought-after language in each country

Most popular language in every country

The maps below show reveals the most sought-after language on every continent.

North America

South America

Europe

Middle East and Central Asia

Africa

The rest of Asia and Oceania

Below the World Map showing the second most popular language that each country wants to learn.

Second-most popular language in every country

Second-most popular language

Interesting Findings

● English is the most popular language to learn in 98 countries.
● Spanish is the second most popular language in 14 countries.
● Japanese is very popular in the English-speaking world — it’s the most popular language to learn in Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand.
● Ukraine has the highest interest in the local language, with 25.94 yearly searches per 1,000 internet users for Ukrainian.
● Arabic is the most popular language to learn in 12 countries — Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Maldives, Niger, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
● The Korean language is surprisingly trendy in multiple South American countries. It likely can be explained by a combination of the reasons:
○ the popularity of the Korean culture among the young generation;
○ relatively small interest in learning languages in Spanish-speaking countries overall (supposedly because of tons of content in Spanish);
○ The alphabetical writing system (in contrast with the logographic one in Chinese and Japanese) makes the language simpler to learn for Latin languages speakers.
● It is estimated that up to 30 million Argentines have some degree of Italian ancestry (62.5% of the total population), so it is not surprising that the most popular language to learn in Argentina is Italian.
● Russian is still prevalent in the countries of the former USSR. It is the second-most popular language in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan (everywhere after English), and the most popular in Armenia. However, none of the local languages of these countries were in the research because we limited the list to only 50 most spoken languages.

The post Which language does every country want to learn? appeared first on Vivid Maps.