With 14 languages you could speak with half the people on earth in their native tongue.

[verdastelo]

As for higher registers, I have yet to read anything written (other than a few poems of Baba Najmi) in Western Punjabi to make a judgement. The poems weren't difficult to understand.

Can you read Shahmukhi?

Yeah! My grandmother and grandfather migrated from Rawalpindi in Pakistan to Patiala in India during the Partition. They were literate in Urdu and they read Urdu newspapers and books until their passing away some 8-10 years ago. It was from my grandmother that I learned the Urdu alphabet. I can read Shahmukhi, albeit not as fast as Gurmukhi.

[Gòl·lum]

What about mutual intelligibility between different languages of the same family? Languages like Norwegian, Swedish and Danish have a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Romance languages are also closely related; Spanish for example can be easily understood by most Portuguese speakers. This would increase the number of people you could speak with without being fluent in their language.

[jonm]

Thought I'd call attention to a list of languages that lichtrausch came up with on the old forum that seems very much in the spirit of this thread.

The list includes 20 modern languages (if we continue to count Hindi and Urdu separately but assume you'd want to learn both) plus 5 ancient ones, and although this wasn't the original goal, the modern languages on the list would allow you to talk to around 53% of the people in the world in their native tongue.

The list appeared in a thread about panglottery, or "polyglottery with an emphasis on achieving a more global perspective," and it's meant to include "the languages of vast numbers of people spoken over vast areas of the world and from vastly diverse language families."

To that end, it includes at least one language from each of eleven major language families: the seven families that Deinonysus highlighted and four more. The families and the languages that represent them were chosen based on total speakers rather than native speakers. And the families don't need to include more than one language.

Only 11 language families in the world contain a language that has at least 20 million speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Japonic, Korean, Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Turkic, Niger-Congo, Dravidian, Tai-Kadai). All of these language families contain at least one language that has at least 50 million speakers.

Building on Deinonysus's chart, here are the eleven families. All the numbers are still from the Nationalencyklopedin list of the 100 languages with the most native speakers (so the second column shows the number of languages from each family in the top 100, and the third column shows the percent of the world's population that speaks those languages natively). But there's a new column at the far right showing the language in each family with the most total speakers. In a few cases, this is different from the language in that family with the most native speakers. And the languages in this rightmost column are the ones in lichtrausch's list.

In the Dravidian family, the language with the most total speakers is Telugu, but Tamil isn't far behind, so the list leaves the choice between the two open.

Following the Nationalencyklopedin, the chart below counts Malaysian and Indonesian together as Malay.

Family	# of Languages	Percentage of world population	Most spoken language (native)	Most spoken language (total)
Indo-European	44	41.05%	Spanish	English
Sino-Tibetan	11	19.79%	Mandarin	Mandarin
Afro-Asiatic	5	5.70%	Arabic	Arabic
Austronesian	9	4.49%	Javanese	Malay (inc. Malaysian and Indonesian)
Dravidian	4	3.36%	Telugu	Telugu
Niger-Congo	11	2.28%	Yoruba	Swahili
Turkic	6	2.21%	Turkish	Turkish
Japonic	1	1.92%	Japanese	Japanese
Austroasiatic	2	1.38%	Vietnamese	Vietnamese
Koreanic	1	1.14%	Korean	Korean
Tai-Kadai	2	1.09%	Thai	Thai

In addition to the most widely spoken language from each of those families, the list includes languages from two other categories, plus a few languages that are special cases. Here's lichtrausch explaining the choice of languages, from post 19 on this page of the thread...

My thinking on panglottery has evolved a little bit and these are the languages I now think are worth taking a closer look at: First of all the top language from each of the 11 premier languages families in the world*. Then the huge, continent spanning languages of the colonial powers**. Then the great classical languages*** which have left behind a plethora of classical literature and provide great insight into some ancient civilizations and the daughter civilizations they spawned.

And now I want to consider Persian and Hindi a little more. They aren't the top language of any macrofamily, they don't extend over an entire continent, but they are the top languages of their respective subfamilies which broke off a long time ago from PIE and spawned dozens (hundreds?) of languages. These subfamilies are so large and diverse, not to mention distinct from their distant PIE cousins, that there is a lot of value in learning a language from each of them. Persian and Hindi are the obvious choices because of number of speakers, abundance of learning resources, geographic area covered, and wealth of media available in them.

German and Italian don't fit neatly into any of the above categories, but if you total up their past cultural contributions plus the weight they carry today (especially German as the central economic and demographic power of Western Europe), they are hard to neglect. I also think it would be beneficial to learn languages from any of the other dozens of language families in the world. However there are usually problems with this such as lack of learning materials, lack of places to speak it, lack of media to enjoy in the language, and so on. If you can overcome these challenges, by all means have a go at one of them.

[…]

*English, Turkish, Arabic, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Swahili, Tamil or Telugu

**English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian

***Latin, Ancient Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese

Others: German, Italian, Persian, Hindi

Once again building on Deinonysus's work, here are the modern languages on the list ranked by number of native speakers. I considered adding a column showing each language's total speakers, but that would require mixing in data from a different source, and that source probably wouldn't make all the same choices about which languages to count together, so it soon gets messy. So this sticks to the Nationalencyklopedin data. (For a ranking based on total speakers, see here.)

The rightmost column shows the cumulative percent of the world population but leaves out Tamil and Telugu, since the list leaves that choice open. Either can be added at the end.

And we don't have Nationalencyklopedin data for Swahili, since it doesn't make their list of the 100 languages with the most native speakers. (According to Wikipedia, estimates of the number of native speakers of Swahili "range from 2 million (2003) to 15 million (2012)," whereas total speakers is much higher, perhaps around 100 million.)

Rank	Language	Family	Native speakers (million)	% of world population	Cumulative % of world population
1	Mandarin (entire branch)	Sino-Tibetan	935	14.10%	14.10%
2	Spanish	Indo-European	390	5.85%	19.95%
3	English	Indo-European	365	5.52%	25.47%
4	Hindi	Indo-European	295	4.46%	29.93%
5	Arabic	Afro-Asiatic	280	4.23%	34.16%
6	Portuguese	Indo-European	205	3.08%	37.24%
8	Russian	Indo-European	160	2.42%	39.66%
9	Japanese	Japonic	125	1.92%	41.58%
11	German	Indo-European	92	1.39%	42.97%
14	Malay (inc. Malaysian and Indonesian)	Austronesian	77	1.16%	44.13%
15	Telugu	Dravidian	76	1.15%	–
16	Vietnamese	Austroasiatic	76	1.14%	45.27%
17	Korean	Koreanic	76	1.14%	46.41%
18	French	Indo-European	75	1.12%	47.53%
20	Tamil	Dravidian	70	1.06%	–
21	Urdu	Indo-European	66	0.99%	48.52%
22	Turkish	Turkic	63	0.95%	49.47%
23	Italian	Indo-European	59	0.90%	50.37%
25	Thai	Tai-Kadai	56	0.85%	51.22%
29	Persian	Indo-European	45	0.68%	51.90%
–	Swahili	Niger-Congo	?	?	–

So that's it. This wouldn't be the quickest or easiest path to being able to speak with half the world in their native tongue, but it would achieve that goal. And I find it to be a very balanced and cohesive list with excellent coverage in terms of geography, culture, and linguistic diversity. By the way, it includes the thirteen supercentral languages that Hashimi mentioned.

I find it interesting to think about the different approaches one could take if they wanted to pursue the goal explored in this thread of being able to speak to lots of people around the world. For example, if you could only choose one, given limited time and energy, would you rather learn a language with more native speakers (more people you could talk to and have it "go to the heart") such as Yoruba or Javanese, or one with more total speakers and greater geographic reach, such as Swahili or Malay? Would you rather sample as many different language families as possible, or sample fewer families but learn more languages from each? And so on...

[Saim]

As for higher registers, I have yet to read anything written (other than a few poems of Baba Najmi) in Western Punjabi to make a judgement. The poems weren't difficult to understand.

Can you read Shahmukhi?

Yeah! My grandmother and grandfather migrated from Rawalpindi in Pakistan to Patiala in India during the Partition. They were literate in Urdu and they read Urdu newspapers and books until their passing away some 8-10 years ago. It was from my grandmother that I learned the Urdu alphabet. I can read Shahmukhi, albeit not as fast as Gurmukhi.

In that case I’d be interested in knowing how well you understand the articles here:

https://www.wichaar.com/

EDIT: If your grandparents were from Rawalpindi they actually would have spoke "Lahnda", or more precisely a Pothohari variety of Pothohari-Pahari. If I may ask, do you know if they kept speaking their own language or adopted the local (Malwai?) speech of Patiala? Have you ever heard Rawalpindi dialect speakers from Pakistan?

[lichtrausch]

So that's it. This wouldn't be the quickest or easiest path to being able to speak with half the world in their native tongue, but it would achieve that goal. And I find it to be a very balanced and cohesive list with excellent coverage in terms of geography, culture, and linguistic diversity. By the way, it includes the thirteen supercentral languages that Hashimi mentioned.

1/2 is a (psychologically) significant number, but as it turns out I think the diversity and speaker counts of the world's languages unfortunately make it an impractical goal. If we however lower our sights slightly to another significant number, 1/3, all kinds of configurations become possible, maybe even in one lifetime! The fastest path there only requires 5 languages, but there are countless other realistic paths to get there.

[jonm]

1/2 is a (psychologically) significant number, but as it turns out I think the diversity and speaker counts of the world's languages unfortunately make it an impractical goal. If we however lower our sights slightly to another significant number, 1/3, all kinds of configurations become possible, maybe even in one lifetime! The fastest path there only requires 5 languages, but there are countless other realistic paths to get there.

Being able to talk to one person out of every three in their native language does still sound pretty cool, and a lot more achievable.

And those top five languages (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic) strike me as a pretty appealing combo. For "only" five languages, they cover a lot, geographically, culturally, and linguistically. You'd know the modern descendants of the classical languages that were the source of so many loanwords, so if you got that far and decided to keep going, almost any language you learned next would have some familiar vocabulary.

(Of course, it all comes down to one's interests. For example, not to discount the good movies in those five languages, but a cinephile might want to swap some of them out for French, Italian, German, Japanese, Russian, Persian, Cantonese, Bengali...)

[verdastelo]

In that case I’d be interested in knowing how well you understand the articles here:

https://www.wichaar.com/

Yeah, I can. But slowly. The reasons are several:

1. The typography is atrocious. I had to copy the text in LibreOffice and use a Nastaliq font to read.
2. The spellings are non-standard.
3. Although almost all the words are familiar, their usage is new to me. (It is like talking to someone from a village. You can understand them, but you have to strain your brain.)

In case I get stuck in Pakistan, I can find my way. But I am still not capable of quickly finishing a novel written in Shahmukhi.

EDIT: If your grandparents were from Rawalpindi they actually would have spoke "Lahnda", or more precisely a Pothohari variety of Pothohari-Pahari. If I may ask, do you know if they kept speaking their own language or adopted the local (Malwai?) speech of Patiala? Have you ever heard Rawalpindi dialect speakers from Pakistan?

I cannot recall many differences. Even if there were, I consciously avoided their dialect and stuck with standard, bookish Punjabi.

[Saim]

Thanks for the answer, that's very interesting!

1. The typography is atrocious. I had to copy the text in LibreOffice and use a Nastaliq font to read.

Atrocious or something you're not used to? For me it comes up as normal Naskh.

If you ever feel the desire to read lots of Urdu or Shahmukhi on the internet in the future, I'd recommend this Chrome plugin. Although some websites (not wichaar, as is obvious from the ancient web design ) automatically show Nastaliq nowadays.

2. The spellings are non-standard.
3. Although almost all the words are familiar, their usage is new to me. (It is like talking to someone from a village. You can understand them, but you have to strain your brain.)

Yeah, modern Punjabi literature (edit: in Pakistan) is pretty much written in vernacular Majhi and introduces phonetic spellings (such as اے instead of ہے), and I think lots of authors try and model their writing on fairly theth usage.

[verdastelo]

Atrocious or something you're not used to? For me it comes up as normal Naskh.

It is probably a Linux thing, but what I see is mangled Naskh.



I have a few Urdu books in Naskh. I don't have a trouble reading them. But this format is a crime against aesthetics.

If you ever feel the desire to read lots of Urdu or Shahmukhi on the internet in the future, I'd recommend this Chrome plugin. Although some websites (not wichaar, as is obvious from the ancient web design ) automatically show Nastaliq nowadays.

Thank you for the plugin. You are right abut modern websites. Websites, such Dawn, Jang, and Rekhta, are a delight.

Yeah, modern Punjabi literature (edit: in Pakistan) is pretty much written in vernacular Majhi and introduces phonetic spellings (such as اے instead of ہے), and I think lots of authors try and model their writing on fairly theth usage.

Correct.

You seem to know quite a lot about this language and region! For instance, I don't even remember the last time I heard someone use theth (ਠੇਠ).

[zenmonkey]

Love the discussion.

I'd be interested in someone doing the math of recursive subtraction.
If I speak English I can reach an audience of about 40-50% of Germans.
If I speak French I can reach 5-10% additional...

And so forth. And then do a MIN/MAX path analysis for the least needed number of languages ... now I bet languages with little overlap will come up.