German overtakes French as EU's second most popular language

"BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union's enlargement into ex-communist eastern Europe has boosted the role of English and German languages in the bloc while weakening French, an EU-wide opinion poll showed on Friday.

The survey by the Eurobarometer agency showed that English had increased its lead after the EU expanded to 25 nations from 15 last year while German overtook French as the second most widely spoken foreign language.

English is spoken by 47 percent of EU citizens, including 34 percent who speak it as a foreign language -- two percentage points more than before enlargement. German is spoken by 30 percent, with 12 percent using it as a foreign language.

French -- once the lingua franca or the most commonly spoken language among European elites -- is known by 23 percent of EU citizens, including 11 percent who speak it as a foreign tongue.

The survey was carried out between May 9 and June 14 among 29,300 people above 15 years of age."

today.reuters.co.uk . . .

http://comunicarte.org/ENLACES%20WEB/chiste%20del%20dia/images/Copy%20&%20paste.jpg

The prevalence of a language tends to track the importance of the societies that use it. English use has been fueled by the predominance of the United States over the past century (although now it has a momentum of its own, independent of the U.S.). The same was true for French in times past when France was a major world power. France is no longer much of a factor on the International scene, so the importance of its language is fading. It is still very widely taught and spoken, for historical reasons, and so it's still possibly the best second language to learn for worldwide use, after English, but times are changing and French will probably gradually disappear from the international scene in years to come, if current trends continue.

The greater importance of German is strictly temporary. Germany is practically the only place on the planet that speaks German as a native language, and Germany isn't important enough to support the language on its own.

=>The survey was carried out between May 9 and June 14 among 29,300 people above 15 years of age." <=

This is a crap survey , how can you compare a survey with 29300 people to the real number of 340 million...

It's called a survey because they can't poll the whole population.

That doesn't matter, 29300 isn't enough to survey 340 million people.

How many is enough?

In America German will never overtake French in ranking because nobody in America speaks German, and there's population in Québec who has French as a mother tongue, and a large number of population who has French as a foreign language in the rest of Latin America.

So German has no chance in America unlike French.

<<nobody in America speaks German>>

Umm... tell that to the Pennsylvania Dutch in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There are also a few small communities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, and New Jersey (I think) that speak German.

Pos Language Family Script(s) Used Speakers
(Millions) Where Spoken (Major)
1 Mandarin Sino-Tibetan Chinese Characters 885 China, Malaysia, Taiwan
2 Spanish Indo-European Latin 332 South America, Central America, Spain
3 English Indo-European Latin 322 USA, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand
4 Arabic Afro-Asiatic Arabic 235 Middle East, Arabia, North Africa
5 Bengali Indo-European Bengali 189 Bangladesh, Eastern India
6 Hindi Indo-European Devanagari 182 North and Central India
7 Portuguese Indo-European Latin 170 Brazil, Portugal, Southern Africa
8 Russian Indo-European Cyrillic 170 Russia, Central Asia
9 Japanese Altaic Chinese Characters and 2 Japanese Alphabets 125 Japan
10 German Indo-European Latin 98 Germany, Austria, Central Europe
11 Wu Sino-Tibetan Chinese Characters 77 China
12 Malay, Indonesian Malayo-Polynesian Latin 76 Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore
13 Korean Altaic Hangul 75 Korean Peninsula
14 French Indo-European Latin 72 France, Canada, West Africa, Central Africa
15 Turkish Altaic Latin 69 Turkey, Central Asia
16 Vietnamese Austroasiatic Based on Latin 68 Vietnam, China
17 Telugu Dravidian Telugu 67 Southern India
18 Cantonese Sino-Tibetan Chinese Characters 66 Southern China
19 Marathi Indo-European Devanagari 65 Western India
20 Tamil Dravidian Tamil 63 Southern India
21 Italian Indo-European Latin 59 Italy, Central Europe
22 Urdu Indo-European Nastaliq 58 Pakistan, India
23 Min Nan Sino-Tibetan Chinese Characters 49 China, Philippines, Indonesia
24 Jinyu Sino-Tibetan Chinese Characters 45 China
25 Gujerati Indo-European Gujerati 44 Western India, Kenya
26 Polish Indo-European Latin 44 Poland, Central Europe
27 Ukrainian Indo-European Cyrillic 41 Ukraine, Poland
28 Farsi (Persian) Indo-European Nastaliq 37 Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia
29 Xiang Sino-Tibetan Chinese Characters 36 China
30 Malayalam Dravidian Malayalam 34 Southern India, Singapore


http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html

I wonder why there's so few French population in France compared with the population of Germany by example?

Does anyone knows the reason? Maybe it's due to politics of birth control? Maybe it's because French people don't like kids or are less sexual active than the Germans???

If anyone knows the reasons of the low population in France please post them.

Thanks in advance.

The past statistics are to show that even that there are more Germans speakers than French, in América doesn't exist a considerable number of German speakers (despite the minorities in some places) to be considered to mention in the statistics, thus French is more spoken in American than German thanks to Canada and the rest of countries who has French as a foreign language.

Depends on what business you're in, too. Although Spanish is usually the general-purpose second language of choice for Americans, students who majored in Art History at my university were required to take either French or German as their foreign language, and I knew a few international business students who opted to take Japanese and do their internships in Japan as a leg up in their field.

I don't exactly discount the survey but in the long run I can't imagine German becoming the lingua franca of a united Europe. It will more likely be French or Italian because they are Romance languages and easier to learn. German may still make a comeback in the decades ahead as a language of science and technology but as before, it probably will not have many speakers outside of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and maybe Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

=>How many is enough? <=

I'd say 2 - 2,5 million.