{"id":2270,"date":"2020-01-22T13:55:22","date_gmt":"2020-01-22T12:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eurotrad.com\/blog\/most-studied-languages-world-ranked\/"},"modified":"2024-01-23T12:25:11","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T11:25:11","slug":"most-studied-languages-world-ranked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eurotrad.com\/en\/magazine\/most-studied-languages-world-ranked\/","title":{"rendered":"The most studied languages in the world"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The most studied languages in the world are not necessarily the most spoken languages in the world. Italians were recently shocked to find out that their mother tongue is the<strong>\u00a0fourth most studied language\u00a0<\/strong>in the world, despite its apparent complexity. But have things changed over the past couple of years? And what are the main reasons people choose to study languages?<\/p>\n<h2>The Most Studied Languages in the World: Ranked<\/h2>\n<p>There are many different reasons people choose to study languages, but it tends to come down to two main things:\u00a0<strong>cultural and economic relevance<\/strong>. Of course, a language\u2019s complexity is also fairly important when deciding whether or not to commit to the task. It\u2019s also important to consider just how widely spoken a<strong>\u00a0language actually\u00a0<\/strong>is<strong>.<\/strong>\u00a0The greater the number of speakers, the more useful the language will be to learners hoping to interact with as many people possible.<\/p>\n<p>All things considered, it\u2019s not entirely surprising to find out that the most studied language in the world is\u00a0<strong>English<\/strong>, followed by:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Spanish<\/li>\n<li>Chinese<\/li>\n<li>Italian<\/li>\n<li>French<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Italian is the fourth most studied language in the world<\/h2>\n<p>The<strong>\u00a02014\/2015\u00a0<\/strong>academic year was a<strong>\u00a0historical moment for Italy.\u00a0<\/strong>It was the year Italian officially became the<strong>\u00a0fourth most spoken language\u00a0<\/strong>in the world, surpassing\u00a0<strong>French.\u00a0<\/strong>In 2014, the number of students learning the language spoken by Dante (and Massimo Bottura) went from 1.7 million students to<strong>\u00a0over two million.\u00a0<\/strong>Within another two years, the number had risen to\u00a0<strong>2,145,093\u00a0<\/strong>students in over<strong>\u00a0115 countries.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Italian stands out from other languages for a number of different reasons. First off, it\u2019s only spoken by about 60 million people in Italy and has never truly been \u2018exported\u2019 outside the country\u2019s national borders. This isn\u2019t the case for Spanish and French for example, which are more widely spoken due to the lasting effects of<strong>\u00a0colonisation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>However, the Italian language has also earned the bittersweet record of being spoken in the greatest number of countries in the world (as many as 26). Why? Due to mass migration to countries with flourishing economies,<\/p>\n<p>Why then \u2013 given that it is fairly complex, difficult to learn, spoken by a relatively small number of people and poorly suited to commercial contexts \u2013 is Italian studied so widely? The reason appears to come down to its<strong>\u00a0vast cultural relevance.\u00a0<\/strong>Italian is often studied by\u00a0<strong>professional musicians\u00a0<\/strong>and opera singers due to its rich musical heritage. Italian is also considered the\u00a0<strong>language of art<\/strong>, given the impressive concentration of the world\u2019s artistic legacy in the\u00a0<em>Bel Paese<\/em>. Italian is also a\u00a0<strong>language of world cuisine<\/strong>, and a large number of chefs and cooking enthusiasts get to know the basics of Italian, with some choosing to further their knowledge in order to read recipes written in the original language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most studied languages in the world are not necessarily the most spoken languages in the world. Italians were recently shocked to find out that their mother tongue is the\u00a0fourth most studied language\u00a0in the world, despite its apparent complexity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":726,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Most Studied Languages in the World: Ranked | Eurotrad<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Italian is one of the most studied languages in the world, but why do over two million students choose to study it?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.eurotrad.com\/en\/magazine\/most-studied-languages-world-ranked\/\" 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