Most "powerful" languages

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Interesting paper: https://www.kailchan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Kai-Chan_Power-Language-Index-full-report_2016_v2.pdf

I haven't found any post citing this paper so I thought I'd bring it up, I found it fairly recently when I was looking for some ranking of "most useful" languages.

I'm obviously not implying that learning a language is a mostly utilitarian endeavour (I don't suppose very many people on this sub see it that may, myself included) but I've often asked myself the question "if I were to prioritize which language to learn given that it isn't a main hobby for me, which languages would I learn first and in what order" or "If I could end up perfectly fluent in 5 languages, which would be the ones to open the most doors"

This paper attempts to provide an ordered list of languages sorted by "power", some sort of weighted index factoring in number of native (and SL) speakers, economic, cultural, scientific and political outreach. It's a couple years old, and obviously it's methodology is not without flaws or arbitrary postulates but it doesn't deny it.

TL;DR the top 10 languages by "power" as defined by this paper/study are for the present time:

  1. English
  2. Mandarin
  3. French
  4. Spanish
  5. Arabic
  6. Russian
  7. German
  8. Japanese
  9. Portuguese
  10. Hindi
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