I’m with you KL. The results have been very interesting…French and Russian :huh:
Me too KL. I would have expected a higher number for Spanish and one of the reason is that Hispanics are the largest US minority.
I guess is like Purplefungi said “depends on where you live”… and your background.
Hopefully, I will see LR in Spanish too.
Thanks
My vote is for Dutch… (hopefully lots of other people want to share Dutch with their children too 
)
I’m not surprised that french is so popular. It is one of the most spoken languages in the world. If you ever listen to an olympic broadcast you can always here french being spoken in the background.
[b]Hello Everyone!
[size=10pt]Thank you so much for your input.
Please make sure you submit your vote. I have notice that a couple of people have reply to the post, but have not submited their vote.
Thanks![/size]
Hi Joha, how about adding Hindi to the list, i noticed there are atleast 3 people who voted for Hindi.
Saniso,
Done! Thank you for ponting that out. I hadn’t noticed. :wub:
I think the surprise came (about French) because most people on here seem to talk more about languages such as Arabic, Russian, and Spanish.
Yes, it was very interesting to see the results, however, not too surprising Of course, like G Weber said “every language is the most important language in the world - to its speakers”, however I found an article which I think would be of intrest , –
The World’s 10 most influential Languages – http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm
It can be a help to know what are the most popular, most influential, spoken in the most countries, etc languages out there. Of course those of us, who happen to have 3 languages spoken in the family and live in a foreign country as well, have our work cut out for us :yes: 
However this is an interesting read if you are just contemplating on which foreign language to consider, etc., if you lets say a unilingual houshold…
To summarise it, The list George Weber gives in his article “Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages†in Language Today (Vol. 2, Dec 1997):
(number of native speakers in parentheses)
Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion)
English (330 million)
Spanish (300 million)
Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
Arabic (200 million)
Bengali (185 million)
Portuguese (160 million)
Russian (160 million)
Japanese (125 million)
German (100 million)
Punjabi (90 million)
Javanese (80 million)
French (75 million)
However, in terms of secondary speakers, Weber submits the following list:
(number of speakers in parentheses)
French (190 million)
English (150 million)
Russian (125 million)
Portuguese (28 million)
Arabic (21 million)
Spanish (20 million)
Chinese (20 million)
German (9 million)
Japanese (8 million)
Thus, if you add the secondary speaker populations to the primary speaker populations, you get the following (and I believe more accurate) list:
(number of speakers in parentheses)
Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
English (480 million)
Spanish (320 million)
Russian (285 million)
French (265 million)
Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
Arabic (221 million)
Portuguese (188 million)
Bengali (185 million)
Japanese (133 million)
German (109 million)
The following is a list of these languages in terms of the number of countries where each is spoken. The number that follows is the total number of countries that use that language (from Weber, 1997):
English (115)
French (35)
Arabic (24)
Spanish (20)
Russian (16, however, remember Russia is just one of thsoe countries but it is huge! AND the same goes for USA for english, India for Hindi and China for Chinese 
)
German (9)
Mandarin (5)
Portuguese (5)
Hindi/Urdu (2)
Bengali (1)
Japanese (1)
After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige), Weber compiled the following list of the world’s ten most influential languages:
(number of points given in parentheses)
English (37)
French (23)
Spanish (20)
Russian (16)
Arabic (14)
Chinese (13)
German (12)
Japanese (10)
Portuguese (10)
Hindi/Urdu (9)
I think it is good to have an idea about these statistics in making decisions on which languages to consider as “priority” languages for curriculum, at the same time it is important to remember as I quoted earlier that "“every language is the most important language in the world - to its speakers” :yes:
I would also vote for Russian ( since I already voted for Chinese I can not give my vote to Russian, but they are equally important for our family)
Skylark,
Thank you so much for posting the statistics. It really helps to have this information to make a decision in case we want to introduce more languages.
I think that a baby could “learn” up to 5 languages. Is that right? :unsure:
That what I heard… But I’ve seen them learning even more…
Ok, it looks like the verdict is out: lol
In third place … French
In second place … Spanish
and the big winner is… CHINESE SIMPLIFIED
I’ll leave the poll open in case some people want to still submit their votes. 
yes!!!
Like them all!!!
Ah, that’s more like what I expected!
Chinese simplified please. It’s been difficult for my eldest daughter because she was not exposed to the language in the early years and now she’s finding it hard to remember and tell the difference between words that look similar. So I hope that my younger 2 would have an easier way to learn this language as the support here is not enough. Thanks for opening up the polls and hearing our needs.