Why German is the most important language after English !

Introduction:

learning a foreign language can be extremely helpful for anyone besides other factors, bilingualism can boost your brainpower, prevent you from diseases and boost your self-confidence.

But what factors should we put in our consideration when choosing a foreign language to learn?

First, I’m going to assume that you already know English because you already reading my article, so the question is what languages after English you should consider learning?

Well, clearly language learning is a personal choice, right? and it depends on why you want to learn a certain language, for people who want to communicate with new nations, Explore cultures, Music, films, travel, and tourism. I can say clearly those are personal preferences and can be changed from person to person. Someone might love to explore Chinese culture, Persian culture, Arab culture, also someone wants to travel to certain countries just to explore new countries or just to consume other people's social media.

In those cases, I can’t say you should learn a language over another, I can’t say french culture is richer than german culture or something like this because it can’t be measured like that, it is just a ( personal preference ).

so, What other factors can be a matter when learning a new language?

factors related to studying abroad, working, living abroad, immigrating to other countries can be measured in different ways and methodologies, and factors like culture, communication can’t be measured and we will call it personal preference. So today I want to talk about factors that most people should look into when considering a new language.

I will demonstrate and provide details about the richest countries, happiest countries, and immigration countries and put many important measures into consideration. let’s started :

1/Number of native people:

First, let’s criticize the factor of many people (native + non-native) who speak certain languages!

Does it mean that the language with more people to talk with is the most useful language to learn after English?

The short answer is: “NO”! why? because the matter here is where those a lot of people located, not what the number of them, for example :

“ The French language is spoken by an estimated 141 million people in Africa in 2018” is above 57% of all French speakers around the world!

While the population of whole France only 67 Million, and 8 Million in Belgium, 10 Million in Canada

and the whole number of french speakers is 277 Million.

____________________________

While the German Language for Example: Estimated 175 - 220 Million german speakers around the world, Almost all of them located in “Richest countries” (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and other European countries) . unlike french which located in poor countries.

Why differentiate those 2 languages by saying “poor countries”?

As I mentioned before if you want to learn a language for fun, culture, communication, etc, it is your personal preference, but here I’m talking only about factors that rank countries according to a political, economical, geographical situation. I mean we all want to make money, How we are supposed to make money in 33 poor countries located in Africa?

it is even hard to build a business, find a job, or even hard to survive there.

German speakers break-down:

By the way, if we took a closer look for estimations of numbers of speakers per language , Spanish (600 million) Russian(280M) Arabic(300M) Portuguese(280Million) , and french (274M) , german(220 -180M)

So that makes sense, the distribution of the French language across the world makes people think about learning french, I mean Spanish only spoken in Spain & South America, Portuguese only in Portugal & Brazil, Russia only in Russia and some around other countries.

and Arabic only in north Africa and the middle east which is a lot but also most of them poor countries and spot of civil wars.

So, My argument is:

“we valuing the factors of where the language located and what the economical benefits of learning it “

in this context, I can say German is the most useful language after English.

2/roots of languages:

This is a most complicated and hard-to-understand topic, but I will make some simplicity to derive my argument.

There are lots of languages families and languages derived from other languages

But, most ancient languages aren’t relevant now!

so, I would just talk about 2 major language families and both of them are indo-European languages :

romance languages
germanic languages

romance languages consist of most of today's languages spoken in Europe like french, Spanish , Portuguese , italian and romainan . and all of them derived from “Latin”

while germanic languages consist of German, English, Dutch , and North Germanic languages like Swedish, Danish , Norwegian and Icelandic.

Again English + german themselves alone can beat the competition.

but to be honest I think learning a language has nothing to do with its roots ,like most Spanish vocabulary have similarity with English , while English is a germanic language and Spanish derived from Latin (romance language) but again they derived things from each other later on .

3/happiest countries index :

Did you hear before about the world happiness report?

I know what you are thinking now how they've measured the emotions or how they know the people are happy or not. But this metrics World happiness index which developed by the united nation focused on combining a lot of metrics , would be complex if we try to demonstrate these metrics here but for clarity, you can download the report over here

This year 2021 the report came with new metrics , measurements about covid 19 and life under covid 19 and the surprising thing is that the same countries at the top of the list this year and last year too, which are nordic countries !

the other approach is: “The well-being approach to these issues is simple. People want to live well, and they want to live long. Therefore, we should judge a society by the extent to which it enables people to experience lives that are long and full of well-being”

So , you got the whole idea let’s dive into the list :

1/Finland

2/Iceland

3/Denmark

4/Switzerland

5/Netherlands

6/Sweden

7/Germany

8/Norway

9/New Zealand

10/Austria

What are my observations?

we are talking about languages, right?

so my argument here , let’s learn a language that can get us to live in one of these countries , assuming that we already learned English

English can help us to unbar these countries which is have these rankings:

9-New Zealand

12-Australia

13-Ireland

14-us

15-Canada

18-united kingdom

What the other thing I found interesting that we don’t have to learn English to get into Nordic countries (Sweden-Norway-Denmark-Iceland-Finland)

Above 85 - 92% of people in those countries speaks English as a second language and well , near-native English

to validate those number I asked my Swedish friend and he said yes , "only people above 60+ will have difficulties understanding English"

but for example, if you want to go to France or Germany

Germany only 50% speak English as a second language while France only 30% speak English as a second language

you will probably have difficulties traveling to these countries if you don’t know their languages.

so, after omitting 1-2-3-6-5-8-9

we have only 3 countries left

5 -Netherland

7- Germany

10-Austria

The Netherlands talks in the dutch language which is one of the Germanic languages , but above 90% of the population also speak English as a second language .

we have 2 left , Germany and Austria speak german as an official language!

only 70% speak English as a second language in Austria , and 50% in Germany so probably you must learn their language to travel there, do business , immigrate or find a job!

and the last thing I want to revise for you , as I said in the last point

all these languages have the same family which is germanic languages (consist of all nordic languages, German , English,dutch)

mind-blowing,right?

4/immigration :

A report from Euronews shows 13 best countries for immigration, which is Again :

Canada
Switzerland
Sweden
Australia
Germany
United States
Norway
Denmark
Netherlands
Finland
Luxembourg
New Zealand
Austria

Which is again if we used the same method which I mentioned in the last point we will get the same result of the importance of German after English.

5/social mobility ranking: here

Indeed, saying “best”, “worse” etc isn’t the right way to measure things , so I looked up into “Social mobility index” what does that index mean ?

The index focuses on 5 factors:

1-Health

2-Education

3-Technology

4-Work

5-Resilience & Institutions

So , that seems quite pretty straight forward

ask yourself what do you think the best health care must look like ?

what do you think education should look like ?

overall don’t forget to think about (The education & health) should be easy to access and free for all people (nice , right?)

for technology , we might think about technology access and use of technology in government , transportation , etc

For example, till today in some poor or 3rd countries, they make everything manual and hard and don't include the well-being and ease of technology !

for work , think about :

-Work opportunities

-Fair wage distribution

-Working conditions

lastly the Resilience & Institutions include :

Social protection
Inclusive institutions

some people will argue about politics , taxes and other things but it is controversial topics, instead, we just looked for (How the perfect country should look like in terms of those 5 factors)

from Wikipedia “List of countries ranked by their score in the Global Social Mobility Index 2020. The value 100 was the best possible score a country could reach” :

1- Denmark 85.2

2- Norway 83.6

3- Finland 83.6

4- Sweden 83.5

5- Iceland 82.7

6-Netherlands 82.4

7- Switzerland 82.1

8- Belgium 80.1

9- Austria 80.1

10-Luxembourg 79.8

11- Germany 78.8

Again ,again and again you might notice the same pattern here,Almost the same countries mentioned again.

We have Belgium and Luxembourg ,by the way Luxembourg is the richest country in the world if you measured the GDP per capita because it is so small country they talk in Luxembourgish which is also one of the Germanic languages alongside with german or french.

a high percentage of the Belgium population speak in french and a small percentage speak in dutch and 60% speak English as a second language .

so this is the only country on this list you might find difficulties if you don’t know their languages, but again dutch is one of the Germanic languages so after learning German you might find dutch easier than learning french.

6/richest countries GDP & GDP per capita:

Why consider the richest countries? richest countries have definitely more political stability, social mobility, and more career opportunities than other countries

and also more quality in scientific research , I already stated that on previous points, and again if you looked up for the GDP per capita(Gross domestic product per person), You will find clearly that Germany is the richest country in European union with 47,200.00 USD and expected to reach 60.000.00 in 2025 GDP per capita.

and after Switzerland in whole Europe 90,357.8 GDP

and Liechtenstein which is also a german speaking country and one of the richest countries in the world (GDP per capita =179,258 USD)

and Luxembourg (GDP per capita =131,782 USD)

so, you observed clearly that the German language has a more economic value after English according to this point of view

and definitely, these countries grow rapidly over time and will lead the whole world economically and politically in future.

Do you know if we combined all African countries and calculate their GDP only $2.6 trillion

while Germany 3.861 trillion USD

and France only 2.716 trillion USD

and Belgium 533.1 billion USD

To summarize my point , Today, Germany’s leading position in the global economy gives us another important reason to learn German. The German economy is the largest in Europe, and Germany has the world’s fourth-largest economy, behind the United States, China, and Japan. This also means that German is a very important language for people working in the automotive, manufacturing, and engineering sectors, as these industries support the German economy and employ large numbers of people. German is also considered “the language of science”, and is the second most spoken language by scientists from all over the world.

7/employment & business

Well , in my opinion finding a job ar going further in a specific career completely depends on your goals , skills and a lot of other circumstances ,

but in general learning a new language will open more opportunities for you ( almost any language )

it depends on where you live and where you want to live or where you want to study and what is your career in general whether a skilled or unskilled job

but we know first English is the most commonly used language in the world whether in business or jobs.

I assume that all common - on-demand languages have their advantages you might just consider these questions " is this language only can be spoken in 1 or 2 countries? " or "is it widely spoken ?" "Is it poor now and currently in wars?" or "politically stable countries?"

you don’t want to open your business in a country which doesn’t have enough electricity or gas or bread (like my country for example ), so you don’t need their language.

I stated clearly in my all previous point the quality of living, GDP , safest & happiest countries those are countries you definitely want to move to or open your business their

so , I will let this point (business & employment) for you own perspective and preference .

you can read more about the topic here in the digital.com publication they featured Switzerland 7th Germany 10th Austria 12th in countries you would open your business in

interesting hong kong and Singapore at the top of the list which is Chinese widely spoken in both countries,

*France doesn't appear in the list of “ 20 best countries to take your business”

8/ study abroad & science :

Furthermore , Germany has the best universities in the world , free of charge and the number 1 country opening scholarships for international students every year .

don’t forget that German is the language of science and engineering. The Goethe Institute is considered the world’s most important cultural organization for German speakers and learners. This institution was founded in 1951 and now has more than 150 branches all over the world, and not just in German-speaking countries. The Goethe Institute promotes German culture and language and has a varied educational program.

interesting fact :

"German is one of the top three most used languages on the Internet, as approximately 6 percent of all live websites are in German. There is also a large percentage of books written in German or translated into this European language. It is believed that 10 percent of all printed books are in German."

comparison between french and Germany in the European Union :

by counties

GERMAN LANGUAGE:

FRECH LANGUAGE:

per language: EU only

learning a foreign language can definitely boost your brainpower and open countless doors for you, like teaching & tutoring , sales and much and much more jobs.

during the pandemic teaching and tutoring online have become a trend for today and future , and you will definitely find someone who wants to learn a language whether it is french, german, Arabic or Russian . there are 10 common on-demand languages that you will not regret if you learned them (English,German,French,mandarin"Chinese",Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese , Russian,Japanese , Korean or Italian)

learning german specifically from my perspective in this article derived from the economic value of language point of you ,

there are more views and personal preference can influence learning a new language

Whether is it a cultural point of view , traveling, media , communication

we can’t prefer culture over another culture and that will be considered abusive and racist .

also some people want to learn a language that closer to their mother tongue

and you can consider learning a language from the same family or root , like germanic or romance or even Semitic(Arabic, Hebrew).

interesting fact about German Language:
"During the 18th century, German was very close to becoming the official language of the United States. This went to the polls and English won by only one vote."

Resources :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8cH8PaspO0

https://youtu.be/Whz5DPtcbkY

https://germanystartupjobs.com/15-reasons-to-learn-german-language/

https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/coming-to-france/studying-in-france/learning-french/article/10-good-reasons-for-learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index