One of the main reasons why I want more foreign languages available at WVU for us students is because of our world going global. There are so many languages out there. How does one go about choosing which language to bring to their school for their students to learn. Probably the main thing people look at is which language is easiest for my students to learn. Another thing people look for would be which language is spoken by a huge number of people. Most people when they learn a language they want to be able to use it. So they look for the language that they think they will be able to use more. I have listed down below some languages that are spoken by more than a million people. The list is not the exact amount of speakers but a rounded estimate. I hope this list will let people see that there are more languages out there other than Spanish that would be worth learning. I don’t have anything against learning Spanish but it is one of the main seconded language courses that are offered about anywhere.
Language: # of Speakers:
Mandarin 1,151 Million
English 900 Million
Spanish 500 Million
Arabic 246 Million
Portuguese 240 Million
Japanese 132 Million
Vietnamese 86 Million
Korean 72 Million
Thai 60 Million
Romanian 30 Million
Greek 12 Million
Swedish 10 Million
Finnish 5.4 Million
WVU does cover some of the languages that are spoken by a huge number of people but there are so many languages out there just like there are people. So who is to say which language is the best or which one most people would want to learn. I know the language I really wanted to learn was rather Japanese or Korean. Luckily WVU does have Japanese but they don’t have Korean. Korean was on my top of my list but it is so hard to find a school that offers that language. For a more complete list please look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers.
Those statistics are interesting. What's your sense of what these numbers show you about how and why we should be learning these languages? Do you think that people should be learning the languages that are spoken by countries where the most business is being done, where the greatest economic gains are to be made? Or do you think that people should be learning languages that are spoken by the greatest number of people in the world? What about "foreign languages" that are being spoken by a great number of people in the United States? Do U.S. citizens who only speak English have a responsibility to learn how to speak languages used by a large number of minorities in the nation or in their local communities? Indeed, how you answer this cluster of questions in turn sets up the kinds of arguments you want to make about what languages that WVU should try to offer and why it should try to offer them.
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