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.
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.
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
@@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.
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
Just google countries where english/french/spanish spoken in wikipedia highlighting the countries. It made me realise that learning french, spanish and english is quite enough
@@vivialanis9521 for me it's cause I was lucky 😅 Since I'm Brazilian, my native language is portuguese. From portuguese, Spanish is easy cause they're REALLY similar. My childhood was in France so in a way my native language is also french. The only one I fully learned by myself was English, haha I admire people that didn't have a multi-national life like mine, and are still able to speak many languages! So by all means, congrats on your learning and good luck with learning more ;)
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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 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
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.
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 (even if French people struggle to understand Canadian French sometimes). Again, the reason for the different names is political, but they can *generally* understand each other without much of a problem.
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.
@@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.
If you learn portuguese, you understand spanish, if you learn spanish, you understand portuguese, The two languages are ridiculously similar and easy to understand once you know the other.
If you know English, you can basically get by in Europe. I know this because I constantly see Europeans online speaking English, not their native tongue.
If you know Urdu you know Hindi, If you know Hindi you know Urdu. They are just different in writing but in speaking, they are same. You might not understand a few words but you will be fine as you can use English words. In Urdu we often use English words. Like there are 2-3 English words in every sentence unless you speak a very high level of Urdu. I'm a Pakistani and I understand Hindi better than Indians who only speak regional languages.
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.
Its still good to critricise it even ic its not really serious. It encourages interactions with the people in the comments sec while also not making the viewers who know does not know about such topic take the information at face value (even if its stated to not make so).
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 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.
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 ❤
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
@@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
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.
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
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
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
Imagine requiring to learn a whole new language for countries with 300-500k population but not the languages where 80-90M unique speakers speak because that country has a bigger language with 500M speakers
@@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
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
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.
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.
@@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.
dutch doesnt exist, its a meme. Ich spreche auch Spanisch, Englisch und Deutsch. Doch kann ich gar kein Französisch. Pero yo creo que si aprendiera frances deberia poder viajar basicamente por todo el mundo, porque los arabes si no hablan frances o ingles, probablemente hablan aleman and that applies to basically every region of the world
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)
@@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
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.
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
Because the local Labour Party wants to make New Zealand a "bilingual country" the names of many government agencies have been changed to unreadable Maori characters. also force schools to teach the Maori, schools don't care about math, writing, science... They only care about teaching students to speak Maori.
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.
@@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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
@@liverbot4854 As a Thai, I think the script best suits the language the way it is. It preserves the historical pronunciation and displays the modern pronunciation at the same time.
@@samomanawat I understand now. Is it similar to English in that the pronunciation has undergone so many changes over centuries that it happens too fast to change the script?
@@liverbot4854 It’s better than English in terms of vowels. English has 20-21 vowel phonemes but has only 5 (+1) characters for vowels (a, e, i, o, u, + y) while Thai has 18 vowel phonemes and has 18 distinct symbols for each phonemes. So, there’s no confusion in vowels like English does. Besides, Thai never had gone through any major vowel shift.
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)
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
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
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).
>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
I would love it if you did part 2 of this video where you narrowed the list down according to the comments and further research, because a lot of these languages are mutually understandable.
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.
Tajik, Dari and Persian are the same language for practical purposes So is Hindi and Urdu. So is Malay and Indonesian. In the Caribbean, even though people speak creole, they understand English just fine. So you only need to know English, Hindi, Malay and Persian in these parts of the world
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 :)
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%
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.
As a native English speaker, I haven't seen an English creole that I couldn't understand in at least part, if not entirely. They're more like degenerations of English than entire new languages. But linguists love to be politically correct.
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
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.
@@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
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?"
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. 👌
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
Wow. You learn Finnish? I congratulate you, it isn't easy but it is unique and beautiful in its own way. I sometimes wonder why anyone would do it, I have it easy because I learned it as a kid. I usually learn more useful languages as Finn: English, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian - and Latin and Ancient Greek for classical education and old historical sources. oh shit I am now actually learning Hungarian now for fun, never mind... it is the only language in the world that feels a bit similar to Finnish, if we don't count Estonian. But it is so different and Finnish is no help there at all.
I'm Egyptian, Pretty much everyone in the Arab world can understand MSA it's literally our way of communication when we can't understand each other's local sub-languages learning how to speak in a popular accent like Levantine, Gulf, or Egyptian Arabic will help you sound more natural tho when it comes down to speaking with locals but anyway MSA will do just fine
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
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 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
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
4:57 Jamaican here. For most of the English Caribbean you should actually be fine with just English if what you want is just to travel across the country. You can communicate with everybody. You just might not understand what everybody else is saying to you outside of official contexts. The intelligibility is highly assymetric. And additional, if you just learn Jamaican Patwa and Haitian Creole they're highly intelligible with the other English and French creoles of the region though there is again assymetric intelligibility due to exposure. I'd say you don't really need as many languages for the Caribbean as you have here
As a German I support ignoring German, but to clarify: Liechtenstein does the same move Switzerland does, where the majority CAN speak, write and understand swiss high german (which is mutually understandable with all the other High German varieties), but they talk the local dialects in everyday life and so only that gets counted. (Imagine state media or school books would be dialect based, when the whole area cant even decide if they speak high or middle alemannic)
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
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
@@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.
6:05, Indonesian and Malay language are very similar, we actually can speak to each other, and if there's any difference you can settle it with English since both majority citizens need to learn it anyway. You may struggle if you're in a rural area because they might not be able to speak English but, in any big city lot of people understand at least basic English
11:41 Somali is spoken 100% in Somalia 🇸🇴 bro. I don’t know you might want to use a more accurate data. Other than that, this was informative overall. Thanks
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
@@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%
Agreed - Claiming 1 out of every 4 Belarusians couldn't even have a basic conversation in Russian with a foreigner traveling through the country makes NO sense. 1 in 4 Belarusians can't understand their own dictator, or the news, or read signs? Also, the note saying the "figures for Russian may be lower now" smells funny. People don't lose the ability to speak and understand a language just because the country it is named after does something bad. It may have plummeted as a declared first language, but those people could still understand it and will generally still converse with you in it if there is no other option, so long as you aren't a tourist from Russia itself.
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.
11:59 I think you need to review Kenya's data. Swahili is both the national and an official language while English is the official language. Almost all business and education is conducted in English so almost everyone you meet will be able to speak it. Swahili is mandatory to learn in school and most people speak it at home and casually. Then there are the tribal languages which each tribe would speak among themselves. So while everyone will speak English and Swahili to varying levels of fluency in either language, the tribal languages are generally only spoken by tribe members. A Gikuyu will speak English, Swahili and Kikuyu and a Kalenjin will speak English, Swahili and Kalenjin. All the tribal languages also have a number of dialects but that's a story for another day.
It is. This list is looking at native l1s and assuming everyone is monolingual. English is basically the international lingua Franca and will be enough to cover tourist areas in basically every country. As well as the entirety of Europe (Europeans basically all speak English). The English creoles mentioned are also basically English and you'll get by fine without them. Likewise countries like Malaysia also have widespread English so no issues there.
@@Otome_chan311 It's been a while since I saw the video, but I'm pretty sure he mentioned that 97% (or something like that) of people in the Netherlands (where I'm from) speak English, which isn't our first language. So I don't think they assumed everyone is monolingual.
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*
The list gets drastically cut down when you consider mutually intelligible language families, and what people realistically use, especially among younger populations. You can probably cover the bulk with like 10 languages. Which isn't that impossible as there's people who've done it.
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.
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
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.
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.
While English is just the best to know, German is still very useful in most of central Europe. The Baltics, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, the northern Balkans, and even Italy and Russia have significant German-speaking populations.
@@duqial I visited Poland many times and like 90% people I met spoke English on pretty good level and those who didn't, we were somehow able to communicate in Czech-Polish and trying to use more international words, which helps. I visited Vienna in 2021 and nobody spoke English there, which was a shock for me. Only people who spoke English there were muslims for some reason.
A lot of people can speak some German in Czechia, but I would not exaggerate it, people mostly know only some very basics or they just remember some phrases and separate words. Significant German speaking population...definitely not after 1945. But yes, German will be still probably more usefull then Russian with their half turkik, kazakh, tatar or whatever vocabulary. A lot of german words are slang words in czech, so sometimes we are able to guess some german word even when we never learn german, but it doesn't work always, sometimes our slang word is already too different from german original or meaning turned to something else over years.
3:54 In fact, everyone in Belarus speaks Russian. Absolutely ALL people. 100%, and not some 75% as you wrote. I say this as someone who was born and lives in Belarus.
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.)
I'm willing to bet most countries have some lingua Franca you can use to travel with. And those are likely the same handful of languages as everywhere else. Europe you can "get by" with English. South America you can "get by" with Spanish. Asia you can "get by" with Chinese. In the Muslim world you can "get by" with Arabic.
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
2:30 Hard to break it to people, but if you go to Germany outside of a big city and try to speak English, you're always met with some verily angry German shouting at you "You're in Tschermany, you must speak Tscherman!" So unless your "travelling across" does not deviate from cities of national significance, your criterium dies here
You didnt consider the fact that A) Urdu and Hindi speakers can easily converse with each other verbally, its only that we may not be able to write a letter to one another. B) Pakistanis speak punjabi as well!
Literally every Arab I've ever met has spoken both English and Arabic. I'm guessing in Arab nations, even those who don't speak English probably are fine with the Arabic you can learn online that's in the Quran and such. If not just straight up English. You're an Egyptian speaking English. Are you suggesting your situation is unusual? Or, perhaps, is English enough to converse with Egyptians?
Most people in Liechtenstein work in the financial field so that most of them speak, in fact, English, plus many job descriptions there ask for French as well.
Most people in Austria speak good english, you start learning it in 1st grade of elementary school and have had to have at least 8 years of learning it in school.
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.
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.
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
Just google countries where english/french/spanish spoken in wikipedia highlighting the countries. It made me realise that learning french, spanish and english is quite enough
@slava7445 it is! I speak English, french, spanish and portuguese :)
@@gabrieldinix that's so cool! portuguese sounds beautiful too. Exited to learn these languages someday
@@gabrieldinixthat’s what I’m gonna do
Just let me get good at Spanish first 😅
@@vivialanis9521 for me it's cause I was lucky 😅 Since I'm Brazilian, my native language is portuguese. From portuguese, Spanish is easy cause they're REALLY similar. My childhood was in France so in a way my native language is also french. The only one I fully learned by myself was English, haha
I admire people that didn't have a multi-national life like mine, and are still able to speak many languages! So by all means, congrats on your learning and good luck with learning more ;)
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...
me and the boys on our way to learn 96 languages
India Pakistan afginastan nepal Bangladesh fijin (hindi will work)
o, graf.
good luck with Arabic (there is no good luck with Arabic)
حظا سعيدا يا رجل@@mouha003
siema graf
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.
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 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
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.
I'm not sure that works everywhere...
believe for example that not s that many Haitians actually understand French
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 (even if French people struggle to understand Canadian French sometimes). 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
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 learn portuguese, you understand spanish, if you learn spanish, you understand portuguese, The two languages are ridiculously similar and easy to understand once you know the other.
If you know English, you can basically get by in Europe. I know this because I constantly see Europeans online speaking English, not their native tongue.
E se você aprende português ou espanhol, vai ter muita facilidade em entender Italiano...
As an Argentinian, we can understand some parts of written portuguese, but they are not the same language at all.
@@Ciro-fh9ybI can actually understand Spanis 🫂 (Spanish speaking people are not safe)
If you know Urdu you know Hindi, If you know Hindi you know Urdu. They are just different in writing but in speaking, they are same. You might not understand a few words but you will be fine as you can use English words. In Urdu we often use English words. Like there are 2-3 English words in every sentence unless you speak a very high level of Urdu. I'm a Pakistani and I understand Hindi better than Indians who only speak regional languages.
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.
Its still good to critricise it even ic its not really serious. It encourages interactions with the people in the comments sec while also not making the viewers who know does not know about such topic take the information at face value (even if its stated to not make so).
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
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 ❤
Yeah it's kinda wrong is many places. Example: needing to know filipino in tge philippines is wild.
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
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
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
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
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
Imagine requiring to learn a whole new language for countries with 300-500k population but not the languages where 80-90M unique speakers speak because that country has a bigger language with 500M speakers
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
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.
4:01 "Now let's talk about the massive regions starting with an A that has been heavily colonized by European nations"
"THE AMERICAS" 😭
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
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.
dutch doesnt exist, its a meme.
Ich spreche auch Spanisch, Englisch und Deutsch. Doch kann ich gar kein Französisch.
Pero yo creo que si aprendiera frances deberia poder viajar basicamente por todo el mundo, porque los arabes si no hablan frances o ingles, probablemente hablan aleman
and that applies to basically every region of the world
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)
""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
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
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
Because the local Labour Party wants to make New Zealand a "bilingual country" the names of many government agencies have been changed to unreadable Maori characters. also force schools to teach the Maori, schools don't care about math, writing, science... They only care about teaching students to speak Maori.
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
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 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.
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
Yup
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 ❤
@@AlekseyPack 💀
@@zen_ithwhy, what’s so funny about me being thai with that skull emoji you just commented?
@@AlekseyPack because im also thai
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.
And Portuguese too, because of the Papiamento (spoken on Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao in the Caribbean).
I think you missed a few countries
Creole
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)
I saw someone explaining how the Thai script works and I nearly fainted lol. Have Thai people ever felt that the script needs a change?
@@liverbot4854 As a Thai, I think the script best suits the language the way it is. It preserves the historical pronunciation and displays the modern pronunciation at the same time.
@@samomanawat I understand now. Is it similar to English in that the pronunciation has undergone so many changes over centuries that it happens too fast to change the script?
@@liverbot4854 It’s better than English in terms of vowels. English has 20-21 vowel phonemes but has only 5 (+1) characters for vowels (a, e, i, o, u, + y) while Thai has 18 vowel phonemes and has 18 distinct symbols for each phonemes. So, there’s no confusion in vowels like English does. Besides, Thai never had gone through any major vowel shift.
5:28 you can aslo just speak turkish in most turkic countries and they will probably understand you
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
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.
@@unlucky-d7bthats 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.
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
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.
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 would love it if you did part 2 of this video where you narrowed the list down according to the comments and further research, because a lot of these languages are mutually understandable.
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 :/)
Didnt pronounce xhosa with a click sound, 14/56 video
Tajik, Dari and Persian are the same language for practical purposes
So is Hindi and Urdu. So is Malay and Indonesian. In the Caribbean, even though people speak creole, they understand English just fine. So you only need to know English, Hindi, Malay and Persian in these parts of the world
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 :)
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%
This video was way better than I expected it to be. Well done!!
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?
As a native English speaker, I haven't seen an English creole that I couldn't understand in at least part, if not entirely. They're more like degenerations of English than entire new languages. But linguists love to be politically correct.
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.
Thanks
I already speak Spanish and English, I only need Portuguese and French to master the Americas.
Someday...
@@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
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
English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean.
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 💞
Wow. You learn Finnish? I congratulate you, it isn't easy but it is unique and beautiful in its own way. I sometimes wonder why anyone would do it, I have it easy because I learned it as a kid.
I usually learn more useful languages as Finn: English, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian - and Latin and Ancient Greek for classical education and old historical sources.
oh shit I am now actually learning Hungarian now for fun, never mind... it is the only language in the world that feels a bit similar to Finnish, if we don't count Estonian. But it is so different and Finnish is no help there at all.
If you come to Helsinki I can give you a guided tour
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
I'm Egyptian, Pretty much everyone in the Arab world can understand MSA it's literally our way of communication when we can't understand each other's local sub-languages
learning how to speak in a popular accent like Levantine, Gulf, or Egyptian Arabic will help you sound more natural tho when it comes down to speaking with locals
but anyway MSA will do just fine
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
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 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
This is the kind of content that makes UA-cam great
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.
At 17:27 he said "Without taking any shortcuts LIKE THIS VIDEO did" and youtube recognized that and made the like button shine.
4:57 Jamaican here. For most of the English Caribbean you should actually be fine with just English if what you want is just to travel across the country. You can communicate with everybody. You just might not understand what everybody else is saying to you outside of official contexts. The intelligibility is highly assymetric.
And additional, if you just learn Jamaican Patwa and Haitian Creole they're highly intelligible with the other English and French creoles of the region though there is again assymetric intelligibility due to exposure. I'd say you don't really need as many languages for the Caribbean as you have here
As a German I support ignoring German, but to clarify:
Liechtenstein does the same move Switzerland does, where the majority CAN speak, write and understand swiss high german (which is mutually understandable with all the other High German varieties), but they talk the local dialects in everyday life and so only that gets counted. (Imagine state media or school books would be dialect based, when the whole area cant even decide if they speak high or middle alemannic)
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
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.
6:05, Indonesian and Malay language are very similar, we actually can speak to each other, and if there's any difference you can settle it with English since both majority citizens need to learn it anyway. You may struggle if you're in a rural area because they might not be able to speak English but, in any big city lot of people understand at least basic English
I have lived 32 years and only speak 4 languages, my life is so isolated
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.
Me calculating how I can learn all of this in my life time:
11:41 Somali is spoken 100% in Somalia 🇸🇴 bro. I don’t know you might want to use a more accurate data. Other than that, this was informative overall. Thanks
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%
Agreed - Claiming 1 out of every 4 Belarusians couldn't even have a basic conversation in Russian with a foreigner traveling through the country makes NO sense. 1 in 4 Belarusians can't understand their own dictator, or the news, or read signs?
Also, the note saying the "figures for Russian may be lower now" smells funny. People don't lose the ability to speak and understand a language just because the country it is named after does something bad. It may have plummeted as a declared first language, but those people could still understand it and will generally still converse with you in it if there is no other option, so long as you aren't a tourist from Russia itself.
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
Lichtenstein also takes 10 minutes to drove through the whole country and everywhere I went someone spoke English...
4:20 where Suriname with Dutch language
11:59 I think you need to review Kenya's data. Swahili is both the national and an official language while English is the official language. Almost all business and education is conducted in English so almost everyone you meet will be able to speak it. Swahili is mandatory to learn in school and most people speak it at home and casually. Then there are the tribal languages which each tribe would speak among themselves.
So while everyone will speak English and Swahili to varying levels of fluency in either language, the tribal languages are generally only spoken by tribe members. A Gikuyu will speak English, Swahili and Kikuyu and a Kalenjin will speak English, Swahili and Kalenjin.
All the tribal languages also have a number of dialects but that's a story for another day.
This made me realise English isn't as common as I thought
It is. This list is looking at native l1s and assuming everyone is monolingual. English is basically the international lingua Franca and will be enough to cover tourist areas in basically every country. As well as the entirety of Europe (Europeans basically all speak English). The English creoles mentioned are also basically English and you'll get by fine without them. Likewise countries like Malaysia also have widespread English so no issues there.
@@Otome_chan311 It's been a while since I saw the video, but I'm pretty sure he mentioned that 97% (or something like that) of people in the Netherlands (where I'm from) speak English, which isn't our first language.
So I don't think they assumed everyone is monolingual.
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*
The list gets drastically cut down when you consider mutually intelligible language families, and what people realistically use, especially among younger populations. You can probably cover the bulk with like 10 languages. Which isn't that impossible as there's people who've done it.
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.
11:18 you’re pretty much fine with English in Nigeria but if want to gain familiarity then pidgin is okay too
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
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.
I dated a Malaysian guy once. He said that basically everyone there speaks English so there's no need for Malay.
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.
While English is just the best to know, German is still very useful in most of central Europe. The Baltics, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, the northern Balkans, and even Italy and Russia have significant German-speaking populations.
Yeah, but honestly you will survive travelling in Poland if you speak English with ease. Probably easier than with German.
@@duqial I visited Poland many times and like 90% people I met spoke English on pretty good level and those who didn't, we were somehow able to communicate in Czech-Polish and trying to use more international words, which helps.
I visited Vienna in 2021 and nobody spoke English there, which was a shock for me. Only people who spoke English there were muslims for some reason.
A lot of people can speak some German in Czechia, but I would not exaggerate it, people mostly know only some very basics or they just remember some phrases and separate words. Significant German speaking population...definitely not after 1945. But yes, German will be still probably more usefull then Russian with their half turkik, kazakh, tatar or whatever vocabulary.
A lot of german words are slang words in czech, so sometimes we are able to guess some german word even when we never learn german, but it doesn't work always, sometimes our slang word is already too different from german original or meaning turned to something else over years.
3:54 In fact, everyone in Belarus speaks Russian. Absolutely ALL people. 100%, and not some 75% as you wrote.
I say this as someone who was born and lives in Belarus.
German-speaking countries seeing German being excluded:
We won... but at what cost?
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.)
I'm willing to bet most countries have some lingua Franca you can use to travel with. And those are likely the same handful of languages as everywhere else. Europe you can "get by" with English. South America you can "get by" with Spanish. Asia you can "get by" with Chinese. In the Muslim world you can "get by" with Arabic.
Wonderfully informative ❤
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
2:30 Hard to break it to people, but if you go to Germany outside of a big city and try to speak English, you're always met with some verily angry German shouting at you "You're in Tschermany, you must speak Tscherman!" So unless your "travelling across" does not deviate from cities of national significance, your criterium dies here
and when i try to speak (probably horribly pronunciated) german in norderney i get stared at blankly :')
You didnt consider the fact that
A) Urdu and Hindi speakers can easily converse with each other verbally, its only that we may not be able to write a letter to one another.
B) Pakistanis speak punjabi as well!
as an egyptian I wouldnt recommend speeking in msa in egypt people will not understand you properly here due to the large grammer and vocab diffrence
Literally every Arab I've ever met has spoken both English and Arabic. I'm guessing in Arab nations, even those who don't speak English probably are fine with the Arabic you can learn online that's in the Quran and such. If not just straight up English.
You're an Egyptian speaking English. Are you suggesting your situation is unusual? Or, perhaps, is English enough to converse with Egyptians?
I'm having a hard time believing that the English-speaking situation is radically different in Austria than in Liechtenstein.
I think they just didn’t include that in the survey😂
Most people in Liechtenstein work in the financial field so that most of them speak, in fact, English, plus many job descriptions there ask for French as well.
@@danielgwynne7266 my guess is that Liechtenstein doesn't keep statistics on language ability.
Most people in Austria speak good english, you start learning it in 1st grade of elementary school and have had to have at least 8 years of learning it in school.
@@bannerjay3347 we all agree with that, we just think Liechtenstein learns English just as much
I've had this question for a long time and it's been answered insane video!
Cool to know that someone who lives in the other side of the world speaks the same language as me
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 💀