There are lots of countries, with lots of languages, and people like traveling to many of them. So how many languages are needed to travel across every country? Ethnologue: www.ethnologue.com/
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.
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.
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.
The differences between Farsi, Dari and Tajik are so small that you can really only speak one of them and still be understood by the two others. Tajik sort of distinguishes itself bc they use the Cyrillic alphabet when writing, but when it comes to conversation, they're basically the same language. They have different names bc of political reasons Edit : I forgot to add, Hindi & Urdu are mutually intelligible in their spoken forms (the slight differences is that Urdu has some Persian influence while Hindi stayed closer to Sanskrit). They're considered to be dialects of one unique language (Hindustani). It's a similar story with Thai and Lao, with them both using different writing systems but speakers of either can usually communicate just fine. Indonesian and Malaysian are in the same boat, with them both being dialects of Malay. It's just that Malaysian got influenced by English and Indonesian by Dutch, but I can speak Indonesian with my friends from Malaysia and we understand each other just fine. Czech and Slovak are also essentially the same language. The main difference is the accent (I think Slovak has one more vowel sound that Czech doesn't have, but the grammar and vocab is almost exactly the same.) Same goes for Macedonian and Bulgarian, though I can easily tell the difference just bc of the accent. But it's pretty much a Metropolitan French vs Canadian French story where you can tell there's a difference, but it doesn't necessarily make it a whole different language. Again, the reason for the different names is political, but they can *generally* understand each other without much of a problem.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
@@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
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
@@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
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.
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
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
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.
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).
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
>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
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.
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 ❤
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.
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
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%
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
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.
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 :)
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 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?"
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.
6:06 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
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
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%
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
5:29 Farsi, Dari, and Tajik are the same language. The only major difference is that Tajik is written in Cyrillic. Some small vocabulary differences also but they are the same language (Persian)
Note that Interslavic was intentionally created for facilitating communication between different Slavic languages, meaning it should be able to suffice for most of Eastern Europe
Si habla el castellano y el inglés, el francés será fácil. Es literalmente la versión latina del inglés, se lo digo como hablante de esos idiomas. Además el portugués es el español con un ajuste de pronunciación y estructura sutil. Después de 3 meses podrá hablarlo cómodamente
@@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
Very interesting video, thanks. Your English numbers for Australia and New Zealand are considerably understated. English is the primary language of both and for all intents and purposes it should be regarded as near to 100%.
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 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
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
Fun fact about NZ: Mandarin Chinese could also easily be used in Auckland and maybe Hindi or Urdu as well since a significant amount of the country speak English + A native language
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
For Singapore, yes, linguistically diverse, but the younger generations (since ~1987) have had to learn english as their first language and mother tounges especially dialects have been in steep decline ever since. So you practically can traverse SG with english only. Almost everyone there knows some form of english, even your grandma, her grandaunt and the local kopitiam vendor downstairs has probably picked up enough to have a short conversation with you, or at least order your food.
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
Tajiki, dari and farsi are maybe-dialects from each other depending on who you ask. I personally seem to have an easier time understanding tajiki than dari or farsi so you might only have to learn 1 or 2 of these in order to get around.
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.
14:56 YEAH SOUTH AFRICA 🇿🇦 i mostly speak Sesotho every where i go. i can understand sepedi and tswana, Walking the streets in SA you will hardly hear english. And i use english on the internet when talking to people from different countries like now
As for the Americas, according to statistics from about 20 years ago, 80% of Paraguayans know Spanish. It's probably more by now. I'm pretty sure more than half of Surinamese speak English well. As for the orher creoles: their speakers probably also know whatever the official language of the place is.
I think you probably can go further with just English than this video indicated. I recently watched a video from a Russian blogger who was visiting Georgia, and she used English a lot when the locals didn't know Russian, even in the backwater small cities outside of the capital city, Tbilisi. She was able to get by with English everywhere, even when talking to the children, whose English was surprisingly good. I saw an interview with Moroccans talking (in English) about a trip they took to Egypt. They could understand the Arabic spoken by Egyptians, but the Egyptians had a lot of trouble understanding them, possibly due to the Moroccans having seen Egyptian movies, as this video mentioned. I heard the same thing about people in the British Isles understanding some of the various American accents - because of American movies, they do better with understanding Americans than the Americans do understanding Irish, English and (oh Lord!) Scottish accents. I used to travel a lot on business, and when I flew from the international concourse on the Atlanta to Orlando leg of my trip, I heard all sorts of accents. I did pretty good overhearing most of the conversations, but the with Scottish English, I did well to understand about 1/3 of what was said.
As a Tunisian, you can do fine in Tunisia with Arabic, French and English. For Arabic though it's tricky like you said as speaking Fus'ha (standard Arabic) will make you sound weird 😂 and many struggle with responding in MSA, so I recommend learning some basic phrases in Tunisian Arabic. That would help much with standard Arabic mixed to it, or use Egyptian Arabic as many understand it. Many youngsters speak English and many older people (especially the educated ones) speak French but also young people too (to various degrees of fluency).
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
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*
I can speak just 7 languages. English, sanskrit, hindi, tamil, telugu, kannada and malayalam. Knowing English is enough at the airport but if you only know English then you will be taken for granted. Be a polyglot if you want to step outside the airport.
@bharath2508 They aren't true natives, it was just passed down to them as an attempt of their parents to revive it, it is almost certainly different from what sanskrit truly was
This is a small note but I think that Farsi/Dari/Tajiki are all interchangeable, Dari and Tajiki are dialects of Farsi and if you know one you can usually understand the others pretty well.
I can freely travel across every single Hispanic Country, Every English speaking Country, and Im learning chinese, so a part of China I guess, I kinda know french so Frenchspeaking countries more or less, and I know a little bit of Russian ( basic phrases) So Russia, Ukraine and Tayikistan Also I reccomend to learn a bit of the language spoken at your destination, because when I went to Japan and Korea, I didnt know anything about the langugage and My whole trip to Japan, and Part of my Korea trip were hard to survive not speaking the language, the good thing is that I speak english, and few persons there also spoke it and learned the words Hello, and Thank you In both lnaguages
French and I go a long way, but I've forgotten so much from my school days and I've been trying to get into that language so many times, it's frustrating.
@@tacidian7573 It is, I kinda know french, and In my school they gave extra french classes, but the teacher had to resign, and the new teacher doesnt give thenextra classes
Thanks for putting in the effort to look this up! Regarding your conclusions, however, others have brought up some issues, and I also noticed some. As one example, you say that Jamaican Patois is needed to travel to Jamaica and converse with the majority of the population there, but they can obviously also understand English and even speak in a more standard style if needed for communication purposes, so while it might be cool to know Jamaican Patois in order to impress them, it would totally not be needed. There are some other examples similar to that as well.
