Official languages and number of countries
 

I was curious to know what languages helps travelers the most. Got this info from Wikipedia.

English - official language in 68 countries
French - official language in 29 countries
Arabic - official language in 25 countries
Spanish - official language in 21 countries

Anyone know of a comprehensive list (or a top 10 or 20 list)? Searched google, couldn't find.

Official languages and number of countries
 

Most Widely Spoken Languages in the World (from Google)

Chinese tops the list of most popular world languages, with over one billion speakers. English trails in third place, with 335 million speakers. This data represents first-language speakers.
Language1 Approx. number
of speakers
1. Chinese 1,197,000,000
2. Spanish 414,000,000
3. English 335,000,000
4. Hindi 260,000,000
5. Arabic. 237,000,000
6. Portuguese 203,000,000
7. Bengali 193,000,000
8. Russian 167,000,000
9. Japanese 122,000,000
10. Javanese 84,300,000

many ways to answer that question but imo English , French - for africa, Spanish - for the americas , passable in Italy and Portugal, etx, etc

big gap to the rest

as far as how many countries and languages there are....depends on whom you ask.

I meant by number of countries, not number of people.

https://www.google.com/search?q=numb...icial+language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...icial_language

Considering you are talking with people and not geopolitical boundries I think number of people is more useful.

Thanks, this is what I was looking for.

How so? If a person knows only English, he/she can visit 60+ countries and do just fine. Compare that to a person who can speak only mandarin.

Just wondering why you are asking? Any plans to take a course?

How d'ya handle Canada? Or any of the other countries with two or more official languages?

Well, I have been wanting to learn Spanish or French for a looong time.

For no particular reason, this morning I got curious to know what other languages are widely spoken :-)

I'm not sure that "Chinese" is a very good description, if you're looking for a language that would serve you well in other countries. Mandarin, maybe.

This is clearly wrong as regards English having only 335m speakers. That's less than two population of the US and the UK, let alone the other 58 English speaking countries.

Not exactly when if you're talking about useful for travel languages, numbers of countries XX language is spoken becomes pretty relevant then if looking to visit multiple countries in a given region. Mandarin is a perfect example, the world's most widely spoke language by pure numbers but it's really only useful as a travel language in mainland China and Taiwan (Singapore as well but highly unnecessary there due to English). It isn't going to get you very far as a tourist in Europe, Africa, the Americas, etc... sure there are a huge number of Chinese immigrants in countries around the world but they probably aren't going to be who a tourist is attempting to interact with on the street in Germany or Peru (etc.)

*This data represents first-language speakers.

Probably right, a large subset of the US and UK population have languages other than English as their first language

I'm surprised that French isn't even in the top 10, given how many countries in Europe use it.