romeo.alpha wrote:So outside a Spanish speaking country, just anywhere else in the world you're much more likely to encounter a French speaker than a Spanish speaker, and people who learn other languages to be able to communicate, and travel, are the type of people you're more likely to encounter. The hundreds of millions of native speakers of any given language are people you're never going to meet anyway.
This isn’t actually correct, because you’re forgetting one category. Although I’m not suggesting Spanish therefore ‘wins’ this battle, yes numbers of learners of these two languages is very important as you suggest, however you’re not taking into account
immigrants.
Whenever I’ve come across Spanish speakers here in Australia, they have been immigrants 99% of the time. French speakers have not been only learners, (and if they were Australian French learners most of the time their level was never good enough to even have a basic conversation). Thus you can’t base the importance of these languages only on how many learners there are.
Take a look at the US, even if (which it’s not) French learners were ahead of Spanish learners in absolute numbers (their not, I believe), Spanish still remains more relevant in the US due to immigration.
And of course we can’t forget tourism. Perhaps 50% of my French conversations here have been with tourists. Tourists are the opposite case here, French speakers are much more common than Spanish speakers.
So to really guage the usefulness and importance of which is more useful outside of Latin America for example or being right next door to France, then not only do we need to look at L2 learners of each language, but also immigrants and tourist numbers. That’s of course also ignoring literature, film, internet and so on.