(Yonghegong road, Beijing) Actually, I prefer menus with pictures.
I had a conversation with an entrepreneur friend who told me he had hired a Beida grad to join his AI-development team, and I jested that his Mandarin must be much better than mine to have cross-lingual collaboration, to which he replied that he was also learning Spanish. When I asked him why Spanish, he proceeded to list languages in order of the number of speakers worldwide.
Certainly this is a correct way to judge the practical value of learning a particular language. Languages are like telephones in that there is a ‘network externality’ where the value of the language increases with the number of people who possess it. The more people speak a language, the more people you can communicate with if you know it. In this perspective, Mandarin is the most important language to master, followed by Hindustani and Spanish. English comes fourth.
But there is another perspective to measure the value of a language: access. Consider that access to a linguistic group is a scarce resource, where learning the language is a barrier to entry into that community. The more people speak that language, the more accessible the community, the less scarce the resource, the less valuable it is for an individual to learn it. Interpreters for a scarce language can command a higher price, though there may be correspondingly less demand. The isolation of a language group can be a way for them to identify and exclude/sanction those outside the community, but this mechanism only works if the language is not widely spoken beyond the group. Recently I was ordering at a food court in Mandarin, and the old lady at the register gave me a little discount.
Access value also depends on the access of your competitors. It is not such a big deal to be fluent in Mandarin if you live in Singapore, or if you are ethnic Chinese. It is pretty much expected for most. I remember hearing from a friend in the civil service (not foreign service) who studied in Seoul that when the powers were looking for an employee who spoke Korean to manage a project, only a few names came up and it landed on her plate. It may be that certain firms will prefer to develop the language competence of expatriate staff than hire local native speakers even if the latter are much more plentiful, perhaps due to security concerns.
And then there are primary and secondary languages. English may be fourth in native-speaking population, but it is a primary international language, which makes it more valuable. There may be many millions of Cantonese, Teochew and Hokkien speakers within those provinces and around the world in diaspora communities, but they are secondary languages to the ones those communities adopt. That said, I’ve heard stories of some Teochew diaspora communities that never really assimilated into their local environments, and how knowing Teochew can open up prospects for ethnographic research there, but those seem to be outliers.
(Beijing subway) Practicality in the extreme. Implicit subtext: Learn English = get hitched to a foreigner = green card!
Finally, practical significance isn’t always the first consideration for most people learning languages. I have so many friends learning Japanese because they love anime and manga (and don’t want to rely on fansubs/scanslations), and not because they want to work for a PE shop in Roppongi Hills. I have friends who learn ancient Latin and Greek for religious/literary purposes. Practical significance isn’t the (only) reason why Geoffrey learns Korean.
Speaking of learning Korean, here’s a guide to learning it DPRK-style.
