If you work at a global company or one that plans to expand globally, then it’s important to understand language trends and know the fastest growing languages. Global industries need to know the languages people are relying on to do business, but also what languages a majority of their potential customers are speaking.
While English is a widely-spoken language that will always be used in industry, the languages with the largest growth indicate the future of your business and where your customers will be coming from. That could indicate new potential markets, cause you to consider investing more in a certain area of the world, or help you make important hiring decisions.
TrueLanguage keeps a pulse on language trends because we know where there is growth in global industries, there will be more businesses who need to localize communication to people living in those places. To help you gather more of a pulse on global communication, take a look at this list of the 5 Fastest Growing Languages in the world today. Some are already the most-spoken languages worldwide, but you might be surprised by a couple.
1. French
French is spoken in numerous nations on the continent of Africa, which has some of the world’s highest birth rates at this time, making it one of the globe’s fastest-growing languages.
2. Arabic
Exponential growth over the last twenty years has established Arabic as the fourth language on the Internet with an estimated 150 million users.
3. Spanish
The continuous growth of Spanish speakers in the United States has made the language more important than ever. In only 35 years, the number of Spanish speakers increased from 11 million to over 41 million people. And this number is still growing today!
4. Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin is spoken by more than 1.2 billion people, including Cantonese and other Chinese dialects, primarily in China and other parts of the world with Chinese communities.
5. Urdu
Urdu has experienced significant growth in the previous half-century, increasing by 95% over that time period. Since the last decade, its users have grown by 35%. The number of native Urdu speakers today is 230 million, as well as more than 50 million second-language speakers worldwide.
