How Many Languages Are Needed To Travel Across Every Country?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ธ.ค. 2023
- There are lots of countries, with lots of languages, and people like traveling to many of them. So how many languages are needed to travel across every country?
Ethnologue: www.ethnologue.com/
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The only language you need is American !!! 🔥🔥🦅🦅🦅🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷
Nacirema
'MURICA 🔥🔥🦅🗿
🇺🇸 that’s the American flag
You put a different flag
@@ggarzagarcia r/wooosh
@@pewq4691 how is it r/woosh ?? 💀
Edit : Got it
You can't just add the percentages together to get over 50% since a lot of the times speakers can overlap. E.g. if language X is spoken by 10% and language Y by 40%, and if all speakers of language X also speak language Y, you've still only covered 40% of the population with those two languages.
That's what I thought
Thank you for saying this
Yeah but it's usually pretty rare that people know more then 1 language in lots of countries, and even if there's people that know both, that's why you would learn 2 or more languages to make sure the person in front of you knows at least one of them, if they know both that isn't a problem at all and since that's rare to begin with it doesn't take away from people you would realistically meet knowing one of the two languages. Basically to make a long story short the overlap isn't that big or important.
@@alexandramilos392 That's like eating nark
He also didn't exactly do that...
I’m Indonesian, and as someone who’s been to all 10 Southeast Asian countries, I can say that English works fine in the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore.
As for the rest of the region, you will struggle outside of touristic areas.
But come to our countries anyway, seriously. It’s the 21st century; you really have to try hard in order to get lost with internet and GPS in your hand.
Doesn't Indonesia practice sharia law?
@@blakebailey22No. Only in Aceh.
@@blakebailey22Nope
@@cuddles1767
Please dont talk while eating your cereal, kitty 😊
@@blakebailey22 if you have a problem with shariah then don't go to indonesia
9:44 i just wanna point out a bit of a problem with the reasoning you use when multiple languages are spoken in a country. For morocco for example, if 37% of the population speaks MSA & 36% speaks french, I can assure you that there's a massive overlap between the two as that is simply the educated population. Being Moroccan myself, I can tell you for a fact that the number of people who can only speak french & not Arabic is very limited, as Arabic is the first language thaught in school while French is the second one.
I was thinking the same thing. But because of how the data is presented it is impossible to guess how much of an overlap there is, so it's totally understandable why he ignored it. He should've mentioned it though.
Yeah, and as a Moroccan seeing the map depicting how only 34% of Moroccans can speak MSA vs 66% of Eritreans made me chuckle.
absolutely should have mentioned it, in several of the countries the added total was barely over 50%. There would certainly be significant overlap bringing the total much lower in reality. Kind of ruined the whole video for me.@@ambiguousdrink4067
as a Moroccan, i was shocked because I thought the percentage of French-speaking people would be higher, atleast in the 50s??
@@yeonjun4thgenitboy272When I traveled to Morocco I had the impression the people didn't like the French that much. You'd better start out with Arabic and then when your language skills fail adding french is OK if they learned it in school like I did. I assume colonist history. Morocco is very hospitable.
I think in practice the list would look for like
English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, Russian, Hindi, Swahili, Indonesian and Modern Standard Arabic.
With those 10 you can't speak with the majority but you should find someone who speaks one of those in close proximity almost everywhere
Eh, that depends on what 'getting across a country" means. if it means literally travelling across, I'd argue it's nowhere near enough unless you want a lot of wandering about getting lost and trying to find these speakers
This video is kind of a silly high level look just using Ethnologue data. I would love to see a video where several globetrotters get together and discuss what this would actually entail, since this video not only makes a lot of funny assumptions about what language someone would need to travel through these countries, it also splits a lot of languages up that probably don't need to be split up, as the top comments mentioning Farsi and Hindu/Urdu show.
Yeah... good luck traveling around in Japan or Korea with those.
Japanese should probably be on that list as well, it's not that common for Japanese to speak other languages
And also Dutch, not for the netherlands but for the former Dutch colonies like suriname
Korean for korea as english speakers are hard to come by as is not that big there
I found that German was very handy for Europe. Aside from the German speaking countries, it was often the second language of older people in Eastern Europe. But that was quite a few years ago. Most of those older people are probably dead now. Stick to English, and forget about French. (Swedish and Danish were useless outside Scandinavia. Japanese was a necessity for living in Japan, and also useless for most of the rest of the world.)
This was fascinating, although it offended my statistical sense, since we don't know whether the people in one country that speak X language are different people from the ones that speak Y language. If they're the same people, then you're still below 50%. But as you say, don't take the video too seriously. It was fun.
The differences between Farsi, Dari and Tajik are so small that you can really only speak one of them and still be understood by the two others. Tajik sort of distinguishes itself bc they use the Cyrillic alphabet when writing, but when it comes to conversation, they're basically the same language. They have different names bc of political reasons
Edit : I forgot to add, Hindi & Urdu are mutually intelligible in their spoken forms (the slight differences is that Urdu has some Persian influence while Hindi stayed closer to Sanskrit). They're considered to be dialects of one unique language (Hindustani). It's a similar story with Thai and Lao, with them both using different writing systems but speakers of either can usually communicate just fine.
Indonesian and Malaysian are in the same boat, with them both being dialects of Malay. It's just that Malaysian got influenced by English and Indonesian by Dutch, but I can speak Indonesian with my friends from Malaysia and we understand each other just fine.
Czech and Slovak are also essentially the same language. The main difference is the accent (I think Slovak has one more vowel sound that Czech doesn't have, but the grammar and vocab is almost exactly the same.) Same goes for Macedonian and Bulgarian, though I can easily tell the difference just bc of the accent. But it's pretty much a Metropolitan French vs Canadian French story where you can tell there's a difference, but it doesn't necessarily make it a whole different language. Again, the reason for the different names is political, but they can *generally* understand each other without much of a problem.
Is it like Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian
Came to say this, central Asia gets ignored too often linguistically
@@thematthew761 Yeah, essentially
Ah@@AoAnli
Yeah
This list can be trimmed down a lot. You overlooked a lot of things.
1. Persian, Dari, and Tajik are basically the same.
2. Hindi and Urdu are the same language colloquially and if you speak either one you'll be fine conversing with most people across India and Pakistan.
3. If you know Turkish, Azeri and Turkmen are very easy to understand and with just a little effort, so is Kyrgyz and Uzbek.
4. Macedonian and Bulgarian are basically the same language.
5. No need to include Alemannic German. Just include German to cover Liechtenstein.
6. A lot of Caribbean Creoles aren't needed. Most people can speak English relatively well. Moreover, in Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, a lot of people speak Hindi as well.
7. No need for Nepali. Most Nepalis can speak and understand Hindi.
8. In South Africa, you just need English. Most people can speak it.
9. Malay and Indonesian are the same too.
10. WIth English and Hindi, you don't need Fijian to speak to majority of Fijians.
You forgot Kazakh in part 3, first I thought you included only languages included in the list of needed, but after seeing Kyrgyz I realised you named all Turkic speaking countries’ governmental language (can’t say official, ‘cause in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan Russian is official, unfortunately).
@@asetamangeldi9070For me (Azerbaijani) Turkish, Turkmen and Uzbek are easy to understand. Kyrgyz I can get about 60% but Kazakh is quite different I can only get around 30%
I think in the Caribbean you'll have no trouble being understood using English and French but you will have significant issues understanding.
In any case he doesn't need so many of them. They're all fairly mutually intelligible anyway
i'd disagree with 7, most of us can kind of understand hindi as we're both branches of the same primal language but it's definitely not most people, under 50% for sure
@@tinkersdinkers that’s why it’s Hindi+English
4:35 very funnily enough is the case for Sierra Leone. Except almost everyone in Sierra Leone actually *does* speak English, due to it being the official language of government/educational instruction. Haiti's official langauge might be French, but kreyol has been standardized by the government and its used for instruction in schools which isn't the case for Sierra Leone. Also, in Sierra Leone in regions that are further from the metropolitan areas, people tend to be less fluent in English. I actually saw a video my mom showed me once of a woman who only spoke Krio but couldn't speak English, trying to speak English. Her attempts were quite humorous to say the least
I'd say in the Caribbean it's much the same. The people you'll struggle to communicate with are rural and old. You'll do perfectly fine with just standard English even if you'll struggle to understand people at times.
That being said he definitely doesn't need all those creoles. Just one should be fine they're all fairly mutually intelligible.
@@micayahritchie7158Yeah in south africa most of the people also speak English 😂
@@micayahritchie7158 For sure. I've never in my life met a Sierra Leonean who can't speak English. You'll get by just fine with English in Sierra Leone. I mean it was literally a British colony for almost 200 years.
Haiti is Spanish speaking
@@cassielangelini5739 no they don't
If you ignore dialects for English and French (as they are much more mutually intelligible than other language dialects), exclude Dari and Tajik, and redo the African section to optimize (many languages counted, such as Ewe, technically do not need to be learned if you choose to be more efficient), it's actually 79. Still a lot though.
I'm gonna try to get it down further tomorrow. Let me know if you're interested in knowing the result, or even make a guess if you like😉
Definitely the list could probably be cut down to 50
I have trouble understanding the different British/Irish English dialects. Apparently not everyone speak London accents even in London itself. While I was in the UK it was much easier talking to continental Europeans and other migrants than with the locals.
@@karlmakhwa4182ping me when you finish
Yeh he wastes time on things like Europe and glanced over africa
me and the boys on our way to learn 96 languages
India Pakistan afginastan nepal Bangladesh fijin (hindi will work)
Counting Hindi/Urdu and Dari/Farsi/Tajik and Serbo-Croatian ALL as different languages, feels…wrong 😭
He didn't count serbian and croatian as different in the end
@@boldisordorin9010 then that makes even less sense. Why count Serbo-Croatian as one but not the others?
Spoken hindi and urdu are the complete same. Only in their written and formal forms do they differ
@@aardappeleten7701 nah quiet a few words are different
Same with Indonesian/Malay
6:07 take it from a Singaporean, you're probably fine with just English. Our mother tongue may be the other three, but many are actually more fluent in English. All schools have taught in english since the 1970s and public infrastructure has pivoted to english as the default language.
A significant portion of old folks who have never learnt english before 50 have had to learn hold basic conversations because their grandchildren are basically only fluent in English (including yours truly)
We're also losing many speakers of other variants as a result. (Baba Malay, Bazaar Malay, languages and dialects from India that are not Tamil/Hindi*, Hakka, older variants of Hokkien, and more)
*edit for clarification
Yeah from the data he's using i'm pretty sure it is only counting "first language" (i.e. primary language spoken at home), and even then it's definitely wrong since Hokkien should be quite high up too; this means that the lingua franca English (or Singlish if you want to count creoles like he did) is already by far >50% alone. I assume the data is similarly off for many other multilingual countries too but oh well you can only be as accurate as the data you're given.
Tamil and Hindi are Two very different languages. It's only spoken in southernmost Tamilnadu state of India only 70 million from 1.4 billion.
@@Indian_Rajput I wrote "non-Tamil/Hindi indian dialects" as in any other language/dialects that are not Tamil or Hindi. Perhaps I'll change to "language" as it seems appropriate.
Tamil and Hindi at least have some significant number of students studying in schools in Singapore, so are not lost as easily as the others.
@@GlaciesYinim more surprised by the fact that indian languages are even spoken at all in indonesia. could you provide some other examples to sate my piqued curiosity
@@charleswhitefullbusteruchi1972 i don't know about Indonesia. Singapore is a different country. There are policies in Singapore that has citizens identify their race, and this affects what mother tongue they learn in school. So if your race is stated as Indian, and your family has history of speaking Tamil/Hindi, school will assign you to that class for Mother Tongue.
Dari and Tajiki are just dialects of Farsi btw also most of the time Afghanis call their language Farsi rather than Dari as Dari is mainly a political name
Interesting.
Aren't Hindi and Urdu like also almost identical?
@@Xnoob545 yes but written in two different scripts
not mutually intelligible, they are different languages
@@Xnoob545 Bollywood uses a language that's understandable to both Hindi & Urdu speakers
14:50 English is the common language for everyone in South Africa. I have lived there for all my life and I have never come across one person who could not speak at least basic English regardless of race.
Learning afrikaans will also help
I was surprised how small a % was stated, I live in Australia and there quiet few people i know from south Africa who all speak English including my aunty (by marriage) but her parents were British originally just moved for work
Pretty much everyone knows English at this point as it's the lingua franca
Not everyone knows how to speak english , and not everybody will respond in english
@@thato596 in the future 100% people will know english
So many of those languages are mutually intelligible, but if I say Urdu and Hindi are the same language I can't travel to India or Pakistan without fearing for my life.
Same words, different script. Assumedly however there is probably massive dialectic divergence in pronunciation, usage, slang etc. due to differing cultural environments.
both indians & pakistanis know that hindi and urdu are basically the same language, except a little persian/sanskrit influence and the writing system. No one is coming after you for saying that
Same as Serbian and Croatian right
Nah, in India we consider Hindi-Urdu as the same family, Hindustani. In fact Urdu is still the official language in many states in India such as UP, Telangana, Kashmir etc. Pakistanis would certainly disagree with the fact that Urdu is an Indian language although it did originate in India. Urdu is only native to 8% of Pakistan, yes it was forced down the throats of the majority Punjabis, Sindhis and Pashtuns of Pakistan.
@@thesagarmahapatra Really depends what you define what Pakistan was during British rule of India because a lot of Pakistanis migrated from modern day India to modern day Pakistan and modern day Bangladesh. If you consider in terms of Mughal rule over India as being 100% 'Indian', etc. it gets complicated due to the arguement of languages being related to religion such as Islam and Hinduism. Overall, I generally agree with you that they are both really similar apart from the Sanskrit and Persian influences, even more similar due to culture, Bollywood adopting Urdu and Hindi etc., less complicated traditional Persian and Sanskrit words used today, generation by generation.
12:02 Kenyan🇰🇪 here😅English and Swahili are the national languages but you’d be just fine with either 14:15 63% English in Uganda is pretty accurate if not more
Ugandan here and I agree. I was actually in disbelief at the stats for English & Swahili in Kenya; almost everywhere I go in Kenya, someone I randomly interact with speaks either one of the two, or both.
idk why he was doubting that smh it's pretty clear
@@shaina8947 I like how he writes "highly doubt this but ok". Like based on what?
Kenya here,you will absolutely not problem doing swahili or English,...we are all multilingual,....
Majority speak at least 3 languages
Better off with kiswahili away from urban centres... and to sound less like à tourist
""1 country, 1 ethnicity, 1 language"
Belgium has left the chat lol
I can confirm, born in Brussels and still living here, I don't even know what an ethnicity is 🤭
@@Benzebuth18 I'm American and I speak some French I was thinking about going to Belgium once and I asked my friend who's Flemish if knowing French helps in Antwerp. He laughed and said no more ppl speak English there haha
I can confirm, Flemish is nearly not used at all in Brussels, outside of parlementS.
My Dutch/Flemish is not that bad but when I speak it to be polite pple obviously spot my French accent and keep answering me in English@@t_ylr
ethnicity= european
example my ethnicity is latin american (or iberoamerican)
regardless of my race (black white mixed etc.
same with Switzerland
I think you are ignoring the overlap among speakers of various languages when using combinations for countries.
I don’t think so. In the DRC, Swahili and French add up to 55%, but are not included
@@kkmac7247 in many of the examples he put, chances are the majority of the people who know swahili also knows french. Is the minority of the country that don't have access to better education in many of these countries. Same goes with Papua, lingo lizard ignored hard on Papua
Makes me wish for an interactive map that would show how many countries you can speak in the world for the languages you know. Would be an interesting thing about informing yourself on where you can travel and still be able to communicate
My father speaks tatar (which is a minority language in Russia and is a turkic language) and he told me that he understood almost everyone easily when he served in the USSR military: uzbeks, kazakhs, azerbaijanis.... The only people he couldn't understand were tajiks since it's a persian language and not turkic language
tatarca da güzel
knowing Russian probably helped a lot
@@siyaceri don't think there're people in Russia who don't speak russian, people speaking some other languages like tatar are just bilinguals
@@siyacernot
@@i001polder people are actually monolingual in their own language, and with Tatar being the biggest, there are even a lot of rural children who don't learn Russian until school
Just learn Polish we are everywhere
Kurwa 😂
Tak.
Nah.
...with "kurwa" and "pierdol się" being the only words you'll ever need to communicate
i wish i knew some polish, theres a BUNCH of polish folk in ireland here. in my college class of 10 people, 4/10 were polish and the rest irish lmao. im good friends with a few polish people and whenever theyre on the phone talking to their family in polish it sounds VERY cool
You forgot the continent that starts with A that is mostly covered by deserts!
Antarctica.
That is a continent not a country therefore it doesn’t need to be added.
@@user-ku4wy2nz1fthats the joke
Maybe because no humans actually live there and people only go there for scientific research or traveling purposes (at least to our knowledge)
@@karpuzvenar I know. Just making a joke along the lines of the ones in the video.
Fine, I guess I'll start learning Penguin.
Thai and Lao are mutually intelligible. They are basically the dialects of each other.
The only difference is the writing system. Thai script changed the appearance to straight lines with sharp angles, while Lao script remains the ancient curvy appearance.
Lao script has simplified the spelling to be more phonetic to how modern Laos spoken language is, while Thai script remains the original spelling to be able to distinguish the different words that are loan from ancient foreign languages, such as Pali-Sanskrit languages.
lao can understand thai because of the media, but thai might not understand lao (central thai can't even fully understand isan which is close to lao)
Guyana Creolese is so close to English that learning it for foreigners wouldn’t really be needed, due to their educational system pushing standard English. A couple words might be needed to understand what is going on, but since I was born in America and speak American English natively as well as Creolese, I feel like when I talk to family people understand me when I speak American English just fine even though I default to Creolese, and this is true no matter class status in Guyana.
My grandparents on my dads side are from Guyana but I legitimately needed my dad to translate whenever I talked to them
@@EastGermany-pc2lw Yeah, those things do happen, but what makes it hard sometimes is how fast we talk and the phonetic difference (boy sounds like bye, “me nah able” meaning basically I can’t, “gyaff” meaning talk). I’ve had some communication difficulties but most words if said more slowly you could probably get.
I was going to say that the majority of people in the Anglo-Caribbean can understand English. With maybe the exception of Jamaican Patois, the difference between our Creoles and "Standard English" is about as different as "AAVE" is to Standard English. Different? Yes. But the same way an average non-AAVE speaking American can talk to, and to some extent understand AAVE, the same way they can talk to Bahamians, Jamaicans, Guyanese and to some extent understand what they speak.
I'm Jamaica and Caribbean people tend to severely overestimate the intelligibility of their speech. Sure they can speak to us in English and we'll all understand but it doesn't really work the other way around
@@emperorarima3225Jamaica's English literacy rate is like 80% people in Jamaica will understand standard English. You're making the mistake of assuming intelligibility is the same in both directions.
Caribbean creoles are more different from standard English than AAVE with the exception of maybe just Trinidad (not even Tobago) we do some wildly unenglish things.
For example most creoles of the Caribbean have a separate word for being somewhere Vs being something (like in Jamaica where it's de and a) . Where AAVE would simply just drop the copula in all contexts
I think you missed a few countries
I'm native Khmer in Vietnam. In Mekong delta Khmer language is quite popular, and it is used as up as high to 80% in some Khmer provinces
สวัสดีเขมร ผมคนไทย
tôi rất thích kinh lá buông của người Khơ-me ❤
@@AlekseyTheNorm 💀
@@zen_ithwhy, what’s so funny about me being thai with that skull emoji you just commented?
@@AlekseyTheNorm because im also thai
I think learning English, Mandarin and Hindi can get you to have basic communication with almost 40-50% of the world's population
Add Russian and bump it to 60-70
Add Spanish and you're at almost 90%
@@thesagarmahapatra Add Arabic and you are at 120%
>60-70%
Russian is spoken by only 250 million people and the amount of speakers is steadily dwindling each year. It was like 350 million in 1989
Numbers aside your math is just plain wrong. There are 8 billion people on Earth, 10% of that is 800 million, which is more than twice than 350 million russian had even at its peak @@LockMatch
Why do you need to talk to such a big population. Stick to the english, spanish, chinese, russian, turkish.
I appreciate you trying to pronounce the languages as close to accurate as possible! I don’t think I’ve heard one of the language channels pronounce Khmer correctly, and as a Filipino I love that you pronounced Tagalog somewhat similarly to how we pronounce it (not westernized).
I've never heard Tagalog pronounced in any other way than how he did. What does "westernized" mean? You mean anglified?
@@hkrohn You mean anglicized?
@@hkrohn I'm guessing she means that a lot of Westerners would pronounce it like "Tag-along" without the N
@@muhammadbenjelloun5067Synonyms. "Anglicized" is probably more used in modern linguistic circles but "anglified" is correct too.
he was also pretty close with the pronunciation of indian languages. Most people say my native language of Malayalam wrong.
Didnt pronounce xhosa with a click sound, 14/56 video
For English creoles it doesn’t matter if you don’t know it because standard English is COMPLETELY understood by locals
Yeah, here I am wondering what this Bajan Creole in Barbados is, because Barbados only speaks English, and with one of the highest literacy rates in the world (higher than the US or anywhere in Europe). I think sometimes the accents of nonwhite people are just classified as separate creole languages by people in other places, and so whatever source this creator got that information from is calling it creole because they couldn't understand the accent. I guarantee if anyone that speaks English goes to Barbados, they will be 100% understood by every single Barbadian and they will be able to understand them too.
@@307pdl So do we split North American Creole into Canadian Creole, Texan Creole, Californian Creole and New England Creole?
Me at 5 years old travelling to Greece: (tries speaking English of a basic level)
Me at 17 years old, after a massive linguistic rabbit hole, travelling to Finland: Let's learn just enough Finnish to speak on a basic level with the natives, I know everyone there speaks English but there's no fun in that
I'm a northeastern (Isan) Thai, that means my native language is a mix between standard Thai and Lao. Also, Thai and Lao both are mutually intelligible with each other.
NO WAY IS THAT HOSHINO FROM BURU AKAIBU?!
@@ameron1766 Ye buru akaibu my beloved
@@zen_ith AHAHAH No way you're online, what a golden moment
Winning through the pulls? Ya get S. Hanako?
@@ameron1766 nope everything was ass
@@zen_ith My condolences bro, here's to hoping you get good pulls on Dress Hina (cos I had bad pulls too :/)
Just a note, those few thousand standard English or French speakers in the Caribbean countries are the *native* speakers of those standard dialects. In many, if not most all, of those countries, nearly everyone can also speak standard English or French as it is what is taught in school and what is used in media.
Thanks for laying all that out there/setting a kind of solid goal via this video. I'm 20, currently largely monolingual in English with very sparsely applied and foggy knowledge in Spanish and Greek, have just started trying to teach myself Finnish and Japanese, and went down a rabbit hole with reading about Dzongkha somewhat recently. I intend to travel as many places as possible before I die, but am terrible with my ability to stay focused on practice. Let's see what I can do. 👌
頑張って〜❤
Try Michel Thomas, it has to be the best language learning method out there to get started with audiobooks that you just need to download to your phone, after that comes Pimsleur audiobooks which go a little more in-depth
Same boat here!! My surname is Spanish-Greek so glad we have the same combo 💞
You could’ve counted language interintelligibility too, which lowers the number of languages you need to learn by a ridiculous amount. I’m a native Spanish speaker who also speaks English, French and German, and I travelled across all European countries west of the iron curtain and all countries in the Americas without needing to learn more languages. Spanish is perfectly interintelligible with all other Iberian languages, Italian is interintelligible with all romance languages except Romanian apparently and Catalan is interintelligible with French too.
I speak a tad bit of Dutch but it’s honestly just anglified German, I lived in Flanders for a while and I managed just fine with English and German, to the point it actually hindered my learning of Dutch.
I'm a Portuguese speaker and know some Italian as well (besides English). If a Spanish speaker speaks slowly, and with the help of my knowledge in Italian, I'm able to grasp around 70% to 80% about what's being said. That's enough to ask for directions, not enough to have a conversation. Nevertheless, I never met a spaniard to whom I was able to speak in Portuguese and was able to understand even the slightest thing. I've been to Spain 4 times (two in Santiago de Compostela and two in Madrid), and besides Galicia, where using Portuguese is fine, I've always spoken English.
Basque joins the chat
@@antoniomari4126 Oh yeah! It’s such a beautiful language and I understand absolutely 0% of what y’all are saying!
@@TusiriakestInterestingly, if you don't know Romance or Slavic languages, Portuguese as spoke in Portugal sounds quite similar to Russian, whereas Brazilian Portuguese is more easily identifiable as a Romance language.
5:40 For anyone interested in travelling to Sri Lanka, you can probably get around most places (namely the more urban or touristy parts) with just English. If you're in more rural areas, then picking up some basic Sinhala(Sinhalese) will definitely help since the majority of the population already speaks it
But if you intend to travel up north or along the east coast, learn some Tamil too :)
yeah im surprised he didnt mention tamil to help w sri lanka and im sure you will be able to survive in south india w a mixture of tamil, hindi & english
I found I couldn’t use English even in Mt Lavinia and had to use Sinhala even in the bigger shops, not just the three-wheeler drivers.
I absolutely love how everyone here explains and corrects the information about their country here in the comments. You should make a commubity-updated version of this video considering all the comments on this video ❤
In Germany, in addition to German, English, French and Russian are spoken. Russian was taught as a foreign language in East Germany and there is a group of Russian immigrants in Germany. But the common language remains German.
German is also spoken in Namibia. In South Africa it can help to speak English and Dutch.
What about Turkish?
@@stanislavkorniienko1523That's the official language of Germany.
@@stanislavkorniienko1523 Essential if you would be visiting the Emirate of Berlin
What, if you already learned english before german, so you dont need to know any german at all then, expect if your going to visit Germany.
Please don't speak Russian in Germany unless you want to be ostracised and/or reported to the police
now make a follow up vid "How Many Languages Are Needed To Travel Across Every Country According to the Comment Section" :D i love reading the comments from around the world sharing their POV on their specific countries, very interesting
Just hindi english and madarin can help for 50 percent of the population and if u add Spanish French and Portuguese u can converse with half of the globe lol
From Barbados; For most of the Caribbean creoles, you can get away with simply learning the standard language of each country, namely Spanish, French, and English. For example, English is spoken daily by most everyone here, especially in official settings, and Bajan creole is close enough to English to be fairly well understood in conversation.
For some variant, it may be still wise to pick it up. For example, Jamaican patois is notoriously difficult to understand with English.
For the francophone islands, learning Ayisyen and wider patois would probably be very helpful. The different variants of patois, as I understand it, are fairly mutually intelligible, generally being relexifications of French over Fon or other similar languages, but I'm not sure by how much.
God save the tourists that are in Tami Nadu. Imagine they namaste instead vannkam. Tamil will explode when they hear this
What else for Tamils
They love their language
@@pas-giaw6055 there is a difference form loving your language and forcing people to only speak in that language.
My Tamil friends quite like learning Hindi/Urdu from me, but then again, most my Tamil friends are Sri Lankan 😭
why dont they split from india and make their own country?
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 They like being Indian, they just don't agree with the idea that speaking Hindi makes you more Indian/a better citizen.
Amazing video, I’ve been waiting for this video forever. Thanks!
I have been asking myself this exact question for years now, thank you very much
I am now in the process of ordering this list in number of speakers and will start learning, probably won't make it to 96 but I'll go as far as I can
Eventhough afrikaans and dutch are different, they are so similar that you can basically speak to dutch people in afrikaans and vice versa, so I‘d say in south africa dutch can also be used to increase the percentage of
But dutch isn't included in the list of languages to learn because so many dutch people speak english.
@@haydennordstrom1300 that, and what the video didn't mention: most South Africans speak English as well.
Although Dutch speakers can kind of understand Afrikaans, it's not always true the other way around, or at least not as easily. It would probably help more with written language than spoken. You can maybe get by, but conversations could be difficult.
@@secame8867 I agree, but as an afrikaans speaker who has been to the netherlands a few times, I can say that I can converse with dutch people decently well without speaking the same language
@@nathaliea_girl4616 That's interesting, another Afrikaans speaker I met recently (in the Netherlands) told me he had a very hard time understanding Dutch. It will probably vary from from person to person and maybe what region or city you're visiting too.
People viewing a video like this are also more likely to be interested in language learning or are already multilingual, so the improved language skills might bias these comments towards claiming it's easier, but that's just me speculating.
Very interesting video, thanks. Your English numbers for Australia and New Zealand are considerably understated. English is the primary language of both and for all intents and purposes it should be regarded as near to 100%.
Thanks for the upload!
This is really educational. Thanks a lot ❤
I work part time in Liechtenstein and most folks there can speak English - particularly during the work day when it's flooded with workers from Switzerland and Austria, who are all more likely to speak English :)
I will say, in the larger cities in Japan, Thailand, and Korea, you can get by without speaking anything other than English. It requires a lot of motioning on your part, and having a phone with a translator app helps a lot, but its doable.
The funniest interaction i had in Korea was when trying to buy some food at a convenience store, i did the motioning thing with sporadic words, and this man in a perfect American accent goes "Sure dude, you want chopsticks?"
In Japan and South Korea, in addition to English, Chinese is also more common
The surprised look on people's faces when you reply in fluent English. 😂
I love this channel, thanks for the work you put in. Happy New Years! Felicem novum annum!
I totally love this idea!!
🔝video. Keep it up :D
I love it when people talk about European colonialism when English, French, and Spanish are spoken so widely outside of England, France, and Spain but then completely ignore how it is that Arabic is spoken so widely outside of Arabia.
Earlier forms of conquest were fundamentally different from colonialism, as they didn't really involve the same degree of genocide because it just wasn't practical. The old Arab caliphates and empires left most local ethnicities pretty much intact because feudal states just didn't have the ability to wipe out undesired groups the way modern ones do. Spreading the language is a more or less harmless process. You'll notice many local languages are widely spoken throughout the Arab world, while indigenous languages are much more rare in the Americas. Same reason why European states are called out for their colonial legacies overseas but not for invading each other all the time back in medieval days.
@plasmakitten4261 naa the conquest and colonialism were very similar, conquest doesn't become colossians because of genocide, if we ar being correct colossians goes further back then European colonialism, but when ppl bring up colonialism we are talking about European, even tho what's the Europeans did was conquest but they were able to move large parts of their population across the world whcih is really just the Americas and Oceania and many of the natives dies from disease like 90% so easy to replace the popualtion but Populations further back weren't really able to do that escpeiclaly in the old world, so another form colonialism which can be swapped out with conquest is the arab/Islamic conquest of north Africa and middleast, and the arabs instituted discrimation on the native popilations, but making arabis the main language and becoming muslim if udidnt have these things u were a a second class citizen, and alot of arabs married the native women cos they had the power and conquering force, so eventually alot of population converted and arabised to get benefits, if uno jizya but regardless they were able to convert these groups under doscrimation and power simple as similar to Europeans except they erent able to mass transport their popualtions to these areas so they forced their cultruee through different means to make the ppl arab and intermarriage. Many of the local.langauegs aren't spoken across the word, knly a few like berber but we saw how arabised berbers acted towards the revival of the language and the magrebis have a identity crisis of sorts, also coptic is a huge Minority spoken among Egyptian chritians who don't really identify with arabs since there their own entho religious groups who was the majority before arab conquest, but overall there are places were arab wasn't entrenched alot fo countries were bale to keep their culture and language like the persians except they became Muslim, cos they HD a strong culture and alot muslims Persian scholars influenced the caliphate. There are many native languages in Americas and we can's till see that, its not hard to Google, this literally have Paraguay speak native language more then Spanish which is rare but native language are everywhere in Americas but they are huge minority because of conquest and it easy to speak the conquers language as its wide spread and ease of communication. So in conclusion colonialism and conquest is basically the same or very similar its that ppl hold the Europeans to a different standard to other racial groups even tho they have done the same
Arab and Chinese is trader language (in asia region) in past before European colonizer so in past both language was money language
@@kacgb5315its not the same
@@plasmakitten4261So... you are saying there was not European colonialism in Africa, because your definition seems to require wiping out the original population. Many South American countries still have indigenous majorities.
If we don't require successful genocide in the defintion, then the original comment about Arab colonialism starts to be a *bit* more credible. Its weakness really lies in the degree of economic exploitation. The Arab conquests syphoned wealth out of the conquered areas, but not to the level the Europeans achieved.
Based on the order of countries in this video, if you learn urdu first you do not need to learn hindi because both languages are mutually intelligible and you can basically replace all the exclusively hindi and exclusively urdu words with english words
id recommend learning "bollywood hindi", it's simpler, colloquial, and has the added benefit of conversability with neighbouring countries that consume bollywood content.
I've had this question for a long time and it's been answered insane video!
Wonderfully informative ❤
you combined the percentages in a way that assumes that all speakers of a certain language speak it exclusively, like if 45% speak a certain language and 5% speak another, it's very likely that most of the 5% that speak the other language are already counted in the initial 45%, therefore you'd actually be able to communicate with 45-47%
5:50 i've actually never tried it myself, but you should be fine with only learning thai to visit laos (or lao to visit thailand) because the two are so mysteriously mutually intelligible despite history
i listened to a number of lao videos. and despite not knowing any lao, i was still able to understand most of the content because i know thai
Really well made video. Keep up
I haven't watched the video yet but just clicked in to say love the use of te reo Māori in the thumbnail! "E hia ngā reo e matea ana kia haere ki ngā whenua katoa (i te ao)" would be a better translation (in my opinion, I'm not a translation expert!) but ka pai mō i whakamātau, kia kaha te reo Māori!! Super cool to see :D
5:29 Farsi, Dari, and Tajik are the same language. The only major difference is that Tajik is written in Cyrillic. Some small vocabulary differences also but they are the same language (Persian)
Note that Interslavic was intentionally created for facilitating communication between different Slavic languages, meaning it should be able to suffice for most of Eastern Europe
The video I have been waiting for my whole life 🎉
Nice! Would be helpful to know the main language spoken in capital or major/main cities.
3:49 Honestly, I can't believe that in Belarus fewer people speak Russian than in Estonia and Lithuania, as Belarus is the most Russian-speaking post-Soviet country after Russia itself
A lot of older people speak Belarusian or a mix of both languages. The 75 percent number may depend on data collection method
@@half55-qo1tq yeah, no doubt in that but here is the percentage of who knows Russian, not who speaks Belarus, of course it is spoken as well
@@f-man3274 it may be first language statistics, where only 1 language counts as native
@@half55-qo1tq then I doubt the numbers in Baltic states. I know that more than half of population knows Russian, but as their first language definitely not 75%, if I am not mistaken, the highest share of ethnic Russians is in Latvia and it is no more than 25%
This is the kind of content that makes TH-cam great
well done with the pronunciations bro👏🏾
Me calculating how I can learn all of this in my life time:
As Malaysian, I suggest you learn Indo because Malaysian can understand Indonesian easier thanks to our neighbour's asupan video that we watch on social media
Yeah nah. We are also starting to "reunderstand" standard Malay because of Malaysian cartoons (Upin & Ipin, Boboiboy, etc.). So learning either is sufficient
@@rusticcloud3325those shows are aired in india too! although they are dubbed
But Indonesian language is Malay
@@maryocecilyo3372 more like modernized Malay
@@maryocecilyo3372John McWhorter(linguist) suggested that colloquial Indonesian would be an ideal universal language for the world.
6:06 Might have gotten the wrong stats here? This seems to be the language people speak at home/ with their family rather than ability to speak a language.
Total English speakers in Singapore should be 96.43% of the population. (2020 data)
oh i thought it was just me. most people in singapore can speak english fluently lmfao
yeah definitely wrong lol. Also since he is counting all the caribbean creoles, perhaps Singlish should be the one making the list for us ;)
Same with Philippines lol, 80% of the population understand english and the majority of that percentage can reply back in basic english.
Also not surprised since Singapore and Philippines are literally #1 and #2 english speaking countries in Asia
Dude great video
The amount of research that must've gone for this, congrats in an amazing video, you gained a sub!
In New Zealand most of the population speaks English but weirdly a lot of writing on billboards, stores and such are written in the native te reo Māori
The Chinese in the thumbnail is wrong, it says 全国 meaning the whole country (China). It should be 全世界 (whole world) or 所有国家 (all countries)
Is it changed? It says 各國 now, which still sounds bizarre to me.
@@JustinG1057 i guess it sounds alright, "every single country" basically
The speedrun of languages names of the end was wildddd
I already speak Spanish and English, I only need Portuguese and French to master the Americas.
Someday...
Si habla el castellano y el inglés, el francés será fácil. Es literalmente la versión latina del inglés, se lo digo como hablante de esos idiomas. Además el portugués es el español con un ajuste de pronunciación y estructura sutil. Después de 3 meses podrá hablarlo cómodamente
@@Edgar-zj7tyok but like, French pronunciation and spelling are just awful. I get the point about Portuguese but French is silly
@@plasmakitten4261If you master Spanish pronunciation very well, it's really not that difficult. In a couple of weeks you can get to have a decent accent, the same with Portuguese
@@Edgar-zj7ty Alguna recomendación de materiales para aprender?
Debería leer libros or algo así?
Fun fact about NZ: Mandarin Chinese could also easily be used in Auckland and maybe Hindi or Urdu as well since a significant amount of the country speak English + A native language
I think it’s important to understand that “traversing a country” based on languages is a little iffy, keeping in mind that languages are often regional (I.e. Ethiopia, India, etc.)
Great, thank you for the New Year Resolution - got my plan for the next 96 days (with a language a day - that shall keep boredom away)
Great video
But do I need to learn penguinese to travel through Antarctica or just English is enough?
As far as I know, majority of the natives speak Penguinese. Only those on the coastal areas who spend most of their time swimming in chill water prefer Antarctican English.
@@julius7506I think it is the reverse. Penguinish may be spoken by a majority of Antarcticans, but it restricted to about 1k from the coast. English Spanish or Russian are more useful in the interior
I just imagine that one guy who took this as a challenge, attempting to learn every single one of these languages without their head exploding
*VIOLENT LANGUAGE STUDY CONTINUES*
You are absolutely adorable and I enjoyed this. Thank you.
This is my favorite video on TH-cam
4:20 where Suriname with Dutch language
Indonesian and Malay are mutually intelligible. You just need to learn one of them to get by throughout Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia and you need to -1 from the total language. Thus, high number of timor leste people also speaks Indonesian as a working language do to previous Indonesian occupation, if you would like to, you can -1 Tetum too.
Also, Thai and Lao is somewhat mutually intelligible as well, but I recommend Thai since Lao PDR consumes a lot of Thai media (thus, many people understand Thai), -1 Lao
Disclaimer: this is just my opinion
The Asian grocery at my local shops in suburban Australia is run by a Lao woman, and she mentioned to me quite casually one day that she understands Thai as well.
and minus hindi/urdu, along with farsi/dari (/tajik depending on who you ask), count the serbo-croatian speaking countries as one, and all the english creoles except jamaica's.
Indonesian language is Malay
@@maryocecilyo3372John McWhorter(linguist) suggested that colloquial Indonesian would be an ideal universal language for the world.
Thanks for putting in the effort to look this up! Regarding your conclusions, however, others have brought up some issues, and I also noticed some. As one example, you say that Jamaican Patois is needed to travel to Jamaica and converse with the majority of the population there, but they can obviously also understand English and even speak in a more standard style if needed for communication purposes, so while it might be cool to know Jamaican Patois in order to impress them, it would totally not be needed. There are some other examples similar to that as well.
Wouldve been the perfect video to get a language learning app as a sponsor
Malay and Indonesian are still similar enough that you really only need to learn one to understand the other. They mostly differ in which root Malay words carried through modern usage and which colonial languages are absorbed into the vocabulary (English for Malay, Dutch for Indonesian). Some modern Indonesian words are ancient/poetic words in Malay, and vice versa, but it's not like they can't understand each other.
That was fun!
Beautiful nice video man
Hey South African here. You should be able to get around most of the country with English and Afrikaans (most South Africans speak 2-4 languages and English and Afrikaans are usually 2 of them). In more rural places you'll need either Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu or any other minority language but in cities English should serve you well
Majority of the country does not know afrikaans. Majority communicate in African languages. english can help with alot of people but not all people can talk english
A lot of adults know Afrikaans bc of the Bantu education act during apartheid@@thato596
As Indonesian speaker. Visiting Malaysia and Brunei would be a "breeze". The caveat is you need to adjust your vocabulary. Even though Malay and Indonesian looks the same, there are plenty differences. For example: office in Indonesian is "kantor" (a loanword from Dutch) and in Malay it would be "pejabat".
Yeah it is literally just different standardized dialects of the same language. Like American English and British English where you'd have to say "lift' vs "elevator" or "lorry" vs "truck".
@@dingus42 It's actually diverged more than American English. Malay, to my Indonesian ears sounds like an archaic language with English and Arabic loanwords. I heard some Malaysians says that Indonesian sounds like "Classical Malay" or "Istana's Malay", because to them formal Indonesian is really close to the type of Malay used by Malaysian royal families.
Indonesian Malay and Malaysian Malay it's like UK and US English
@@maryocecilyo3372nah, more like Dutch english and UK english
I love that you included my country, Guyana on this list! Though I don't consider Guyanese Creole to be a separate language from English, I could understand how others might not understand what we say sometimes.
The Africa string along was wild.. loved it
14:56 YEAH SOUTH AFRICA 🇿🇦 i mostly speak Sesotho every where i go. i can understand sepedi and tswana, Walking the streets in SA you will hardly hear english. And i use english on the internet when talking to people from different countries like now
I think you probably can go further with just English than this video indicated. I recently watched a video from a Russian blogger who was visiting Georgia, and she used English a lot when the locals didn't know Russian, even in the backwater small cities outside of the capital city, Tbilisi. She was able to get by with English everywhere, even when talking to the children, whose English was surprisingly good.
I saw an interview with Moroccans talking (in English) about a trip they took to Egypt. They could understand the Arabic spoken by Egyptians, but the Egyptians had a lot of trouble understanding them, possibly due to the Moroccans having seen Egyptian movies, as this video mentioned. I heard the same thing about people in the British Isles understanding some of the various American accents - because of American movies, they do better with understanding Americans than the Americans do understanding Irish, English and (oh Lord!) Scottish accents. I used to travel a lot on business, and when I flew from the international concourse on the Atlanta to Orlando leg of my trip, I heard all sorts of accents. I did pretty good overhearing most of the conversations, but the with Scottish English, I did well to understand about 1/3 of what was said.
As a Tunisian, you can do fine in Tunisia with Arabic, French and English. For Arabic though it's tricky like you said as speaking Fus'ha (standard Arabic) will make you sound weird 😂 and many struggle with responding in MSA, so I recommend learning some basic phrases in Tunisian Arabic. That would help much with standard Arabic mixed to it, or use Egyptian Arabic as many understand it.
Many youngsters speak English and many older people (especially the educated ones) speak French but also young people too (to various degrees of fluency).
Thank you-incrdible picture. sleep well~ Lingolizard!:))
Not sure where you get your data, but I'd be very surprised if French was so widely spoken in the Gambia compared to English. I'm not surprised about it having many speakers due to Senegal being all around, but English being so low in comparison is very surprising.
he says where he gets his data at the start
Bro he says Ethnologue 💀