A few years ago, my wife informed me that her nephew was going to start studying a foreign language in middle school. He had wanted to study French, but his mother made him study Spanish instead, insisting that the language was more useful. Now admittedly, where their family lives, like most of the United States, has a much larger Spanish-speaking population than French, yet this still set off the usual rant I give whenever someone claims that one language is more important or more useful than another. Personally, I believe that different languages are like different tools in a toolbox, and that it is just as absurd to insist that a hammer is objectively more useful than a saw as it is to claim that one language is more important than another. Like the tools in my metaphor, it really depends on what your purpose is. If you're trying to cut wood in half, for instance, a hammer is going to be useless compared with a saw. Likewise, what makes a language useful depends wholly on what purpose you plan on using it for.
The argument then usually goes something like this. The purpose of language is to communicate, and I agree with that just fine, but from there it only follows that the language that allows us to communicate with the highest number of people is the most useful. There are a lot of Hispanics in the area; therefore, Spanish is the most useful. From there, it follows that we should all use the list above to determine which languages are worth learning and which aren't (and I know that Hungarian has no business on this list, but I'm going to use it later to prove a point). However, basing usefulness on the number of speakers is clearly flawed for a number of reasons. The example I share with my students whenever we discuss this is that I speak two foreign languages: Spanish and Hungarian. Spanish has some 400 million speakers whereas Hungarian has roughly 15 million. I then ask them which one they think I use more often, and they all invariably answer Spanish, which is 100% wrong. Spanish, I explain, is something I learned while I was living in Argentina. While I was there, it was incredibly useful, but since leaving there (and especially since moving to Qatar) I have had very little use for it. That is, though there may 400 million people who speak it, I don't really have any reason or occasion to speak with any of them. Hungarian may have fewer native speakers, but it is the language of my ancestry. My grandfather spoke Hungarian. It's a language I want to pass on to my children, so I try to speak it with them everyday. I try to follow the news and keep up my proficiency in the language pretty much everyday. There may not be many Hungarian speakers here in Qatar, but I actively seek out the few there are. The point is that it's not the number of speakers that made the language important to me. I chose to make it an important part of my life, and so it is. Another way I like to put it is that a language is only as important as you make it. There may be several 100 million people who speak a language, but it doesn't mean I'm going to ever have any reason or desire to talk to any of them.
Another argument I sometimes hear, especially in Qatar, is that maybe the number of native speakers isn't what matters, but the language's potential to be used in multiple countries. A year ago, I asked some of students if they had to learn another language in addition to English, which one would it be. I suggested that another language from the Middle East like Turkish or Farsi might be useful because they are also important languages within Islam and their countries shared similar business and political interests as Qatar, but one student disagreed. She said that Turkish wasn't an important language at all because if she learned it she would basically only be able to communicate with people in Turkey. She went on to explain that Dutch would be much more useful because it is spoken in both the Netherlands AND Belgium. (This argument is, of course, flawed even by her own standards, since Turkish is also an official language in Cyprus, and Turks have immigrated to several different countries. For instance, though it is not an official language in Germany, there is a large Turkish population. There is also a large Turkish population right here in Qatar, where she lives). Beyond all that, if she were to travel to either the Netherlands or Belgium, wouldn't she just speak in English, since she already knew that language? Does she need an additional lingua franca? The question I ended up asking her was simply who in the Netherlands or Belgium was she planning on talking to and about what? Or was she planning on traveling there sometime? In other words, I wanted to know what her purpose was. A twenty-something Qatari girl may very well have some valid reasons to communicate with people from the Benelux countries, but if the only reason is because they're there, and they exist, it doesn't seem like the strongest reason. Ultimately though, I couldn't convince her. In her mind, two was greater than one, even if there were more compelling reasons to learn something spoken in only one country.
To further demonstrate that language usefulness isn't necessarily related to numbers, with this same class I tried to convince them that learning Tagalog, Sinhala, Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, or Malayalam might be useful since immigrant laborers make up the largest percentage of the population of Qatar from India (20%), Nepal (13%), the Philippines (10%), Pakistan (7%), and Sri Lanka (5%). Since they work as housemaids, cooks, and drivers, I'm pretty sure every single one of my students knows someone that speaks one of these languages, yet I could not convince a single student that learning the language of the people that served them would be of any use. The reason they give is one I so often hear: we shouldn't learn their language because they should learn ours. I think this really demonstrates that learning a language is about more than just being able to communicate with different people. It also has to do with the relationship you want to have with the people and the culture that uses that language, and if you want to maintain a hierarchical relationship, you can't very well learn the language of the help.
statistics taken from Wikipedia, so take it for what it's worth
The argument then usually goes something like this. The purpose of language is to communicate, and I agree with that just fine, but from there it only follows that the language that allows us to communicate with the highest number of people is the most useful. There are a lot of Hispanics in the area; therefore, Spanish is the most useful. From there, it follows that we should all use the list above to determine which languages are worth learning and which aren't (and I know that Hungarian has no business on this list, but I'm going to use it later to prove a point). However, basing usefulness on the number of speakers is clearly flawed for a number of reasons. The example I share with my students whenever we discuss this is that I speak two foreign languages: Spanish and Hungarian. Spanish has some 400 million speakers whereas Hungarian has roughly 15 million. I then ask them which one they think I use more often, and they all invariably answer Spanish, which is 100% wrong. Spanish, I explain, is something I learned while I was living in Argentina. While I was there, it was incredibly useful, but since leaving there (and especially since moving to Qatar) I have had very little use for it. That is, though there may 400 million people who speak it, I don't really have any reason or occasion to speak with any of them. Hungarian may have fewer native speakers, but it is the language of my ancestry. My grandfather spoke Hungarian. It's a language I want to pass on to my children, so I try to speak it with them everyday. I try to follow the news and keep up my proficiency in the language pretty much everyday. There may not be many Hungarian speakers here in Qatar, but I actively seek out the few there are. The point is that it's not the number of speakers that made the language important to me. I chose to make it an important part of my life, and so it is. Another way I like to put it is that a language is only as important as you make it. There may be several 100 million people who speak a language, but it doesn't mean I'm going to ever have any reason or desire to talk to any of them.
Another argument I sometimes hear, especially in Qatar, is that maybe the number of native speakers isn't what matters, but the language's potential to be used in multiple countries. A year ago, I asked some of students if they had to learn another language in addition to English, which one would it be. I suggested that another language from the Middle East like Turkish or Farsi might be useful because they are also important languages within Islam and their countries shared similar business and political interests as Qatar, but one student disagreed. She said that Turkish wasn't an important language at all because if she learned it she would basically only be able to communicate with people in Turkey. She went on to explain that Dutch would be much more useful because it is spoken in both the Netherlands AND Belgium. (This argument is, of course, flawed even by her own standards, since Turkish is also an official language in Cyprus, and Turks have immigrated to several different countries. For instance, though it is not an official language in Germany, there is a large Turkish population. There is also a large Turkish population right here in Qatar, where she lives). Beyond all that, if she were to travel to either the Netherlands or Belgium, wouldn't she just speak in English, since she already knew that language? Does she need an additional lingua franca? The question I ended up asking her was simply who in the Netherlands or Belgium was she planning on talking to and about what? Or was she planning on traveling there sometime? In other words, I wanted to know what her purpose was. A twenty-something Qatari girl may very well have some valid reasons to communicate with people from the Benelux countries, but if the only reason is because they're there, and they exist, it doesn't seem like the strongest reason. Ultimately though, I couldn't convince her. In her mind, two was greater than one, even if there were more compelling reasons to learn something spoken in only one country.
Population of Qatar by ethnic group, taken from an interesting article on urban planning in Qatar
To further demonstrate that language usefulness isn't necessarily related to numbers, with this same class I tried to convince them that learning Tagalog, Sinhala, Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, or Malayalam might be useful since immigrant laborers make up the largest percentage of the population of Qatar from India (20%), Nepal (13%), the Philippines (10%), Pakistan (7%), and Sri Lanka (5%). Since they work as housemaids, cooks, and drivers, I'm pretty sure every single one of my students knows someone that speaks one of these languages, yet I could not convince a single student that learning the language of the people that served them would be of any use. The reason they give is one I so often hear: we shouldn't learn their language because they should learn ours. I think this really demonstrates that learning a language is about more than just being able to communicate with different people. It also has to do with the relationship you want to have with the people and the culture that uses that language, and if you want to maintain a hierarchical relationship, you can't very well learn the language of the help.
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