02.06.08 Small country? It’s all relative!

The Université de Provence in France has compiled a list of the world’s 88 most important languages. Dutch ranked sixth.

In addition to the number of speakers of a language, the scoring is based on such factors as its online presence, the number of Wikipedia articles in the language, and the volume of translations into and from the language.

While English tops the list, the world’s most widely spoken language, Mandarin Chinese, only ranks 18^th. Dutch comes in after Japanese (5^th), beating such languages as Arabic (7^th) and Russian (14^th).

The online presence sub-list is of course headed by English, followed by Mandarin, with Dutch claiming the 11^th place. This sub-list shows that the presence of Dutch (11^th) is higher than, for example, Russian (17^th). Ranked according to translation volume (Dutch as the source language), Dutch just makes the top ten. The most common source language is English, ahead of French and German.

Click here for the article in Dutch or here for a French-language document on the study in question.