LANGUAGE, POWER, AND THE ILLUSION OF NUMBERS

 People often ask: Which language is spoken the most in the world?

The most common answer is Chinese.
But that answer hides more than it reveals.

What people casually call “Chinese” is not a single language. It is a group of languages—Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka—many of which are not mutually intelligible when spoken. If the same standard were applied in Europe, Spanish, French, and Italian would never be counted as one language. Yet for political and statistical convenience, they are merged into a single massive number.

Mandarin appears dominant mostly because of population size, not because of global function. The vast majority of Mandarin speakers are native speakers using it within one cultural and political sphere. Very few people learn Mandarin as a neutral bridge language between different societies.

English is different.
English is spoken by so many people because it is useful, not because of population. Most English users are not native speakers. English is the language of science, aviation, programming, contracts, international trade, and the internet. It connects people who do not share culture, history, or ideology. That function—not numbers—is what gives a language power.

By the numbers: Mandarin has ~1.1 billion speakers, Cantonese ~80 million, Hokkien ~50 million. English? Only 380 million native speakers, but 1.4 billion total because everyone borrows it. Spanish ~550 million, Hindi ~600 million, French ~300 million, Arabic ~310 million. Meanwhile, over 7,000 languages exist, and 40% are dying—some with just a handful of speakers left. So yes, the world is big, but English still runs the party.

Zooming out, the world contains around 7,000 languages.
That sounds like incredible diversity, but the truth is harsh:
over 40% of these languages are endangered, and many have only a few dozen speakers left. Some have only one living speaker. On average, a language disappears every few weeks.

Languages do not die because they are inferior.
They die because power shifts.
When education, jobs, and mobility require a dominant language, smaller ones fade away. Romance about “preserving culture” rarely survives economic reality.

People also ask: What is the oldest language in the world?
There is no single answer. Languages constantly change; they do not have clear birthdates. But the oldest written languages we know—like Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian—date back more than five thousand years. They are gone. Completely.

Some languages are ancient and still alive. Tamil, Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese writing traditions stretch back thousands of years. But even these languages have changed dramatically. Survival does not mean stagnation—it means adaptation backed by political, economic, and institutional power.

This leads to a simple but uncomfortable conclusion:
language is not just communication—it is infrastructure.

Strong languages dominate not because they are beautiful or logical, but because they are tied to money, technology, and authority. Weak languages disappear not because their speakers failed, but because the world stopped rewarding their use.

In the future, the number of languages will shrink further. A small group will dominate global communication. The rest will survive only in pockets—or vanish entirely.

So when choosing a language to learn, the real question is not How many people speak it?
The real question is:
Where does this language give access—to knowledge, to markets, to power?

Because in the end, languages do not compete on history or pride.
They compete on usefulness.