A look into the language courses people are searching for online reveals some curious things.
It's possible, using tools provided by Overture and others, to see statistics on what people are searching for online. As a provider of language learning resources I ran a search on the 12 July 2007 using Overture, which gives details from the previous month. The results are interesting.
Firstly, language popularity seems to be inconsistent across the phrases people search for. Among people searching for a language course, the top requirement is for English (2,762 searches). Is that curious? Overture provides information from the English versions of search engines, so is that interesting that, for instance, Spanish speakers are using an English search engine, or is it to be expected that foreigners in an English speaking country are using the default search engine provided by their browser to find English language courses?
What comes up next is a surprise: Italian (2,160). Why would Americans want to learn Italian when the two countries are so far apart and it appears to be only the world's 19th most popularly spoken language? It turns out Italy is one of the top five foreign vacation destinations for Americans who enjoy Tuscany, Lombardy, Rome and Venice. Italy's image worldwide also works well: football, restaurants, The Sopranos.
Next up is Spanish (1,266). That seems to make sense. For English speakers, Spanish is the world's next most popular language that's close to our own, and many of us holiday in Spanish speaking countries or work with Spanish speaking colleagues.
With 792 searchers, Japanese is a surprisingly popular choice. Perhaps work sometimes demands it, but I wonder how many would like to learn it simply as a curiosity. The figures for how many actually stick with the program and do manage to learn it would be interesting to see.
So those were the results of people searching for some variation of 'language course'. What about people searching for 'learn language'? Well, 7,788 people wanted to learn Spanish and the second most popular language people wanted to learn (3,374) is sign language.
Now, there are lots of sign languages, including English and American which are mutually unintelligable, and very little information on how many 'speakers' there are for each, but the British Deaf Association thinks up to 250,000 people use some BSL every day. If Americans do so in the same proportion, that would make 1,238,724 daily 'speakers' which makes it slightly more popular worldwide than Bai, spoken in parts of China, and a little less popular than Makonde, spoken by the people of Mozambique and Tanzania. But that's unfair .. people are much more likely in the UK or America to come across someone who signs than someone who speaks Makonde. All of which makes sign language an interesting alternative second language to Spanish, French, Italian and so on. Just in case it's not clear, sign language is a proper language.
Another language I was expecting to see people wanting courses in is Chinese, given all the publicity about China being a burgeoning economy and all the trade we are doing with that country, but no-one seemed to want a Chinese language course. However, in the 'learn language' search, Chinese came up quite high with 3,374 seekers.
And the wildcard? Korean. 1,360 people a month want to learn the Korean language. I don't know why.
