How Many Languages Are Needed To Travel Across Every Country?

There are lots of countries, with lots of languages, and people like traveling to many of them. So how many languages are needed to travel across every country?

[Elisadoesstuff]

The only language you need is American !!! 🔥🔥🦅🦅🦅🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷

[graf]

me and the boys on our way to learn 96 languages

[JoelDZ]

You can't just add the percentages together to get over 50% since a lot of the times speakers can overlap. E.g. if language X is spoken by 10% and language Y by 40%, and if all speakers of language X also speak language Y, you've still only covered 40% of the population with those two languages.

[UniqueNCS]

9:44 i just wanna point out a bit of a problem with the reasoning you use when multiple languages are spoken in a country. For morocco for example, if 37% of the population speaks MSA & 36% speaks french, I can assure you that there's a massive overlap between the two as that is simply the educated population. Being Moroccan myself, I can tell you for a fact that the number of people who can only speak french & not Arabic is very limited, as Arabic is the first language thaught in school while French is the second one.

[kilanspeaks]

I’m Indonesian, and as someone who’s been to all 10 Southeast Asian countries, I can say that English works fine in the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore.

As for the rest of the region, you will struggle outside of touristic areas.

But come to our countries anyway, seriously. It’s the 21st century; you really have to try hard in order to get lost with internet and GPS in your hand.

[marieobst]

I think in practice the list would look for like
English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, Russian, Hindi, Swahili, Indonesian and Modern Standard Arabic.
With those 10 you can't speak with the majority but you should find someone who speaks one of those in close proximity almost everywhere

[pynchones]

This list can be trimmed down a lot. You overlooked a lot of things.

1. Persian, Dari, and Tajik are basically the same.
2. Hindi and Urdu are the same language colloquially and if you speak either one you'll be fine conversing with most people across India and Pakistan.
3. If you know Turkish, Azeri and Turkmen are very easy to understand and with just a little effort, so is Kyrgyz and Uzbek.
4. Macedonian and Bulgarian are basically the same language.
5. No need to include Alemannic German. Just include German to cover Liechtenstein.
6. A lot of Caribbean Creoles aren't needed. Most people can speak English relatively well. Moreover, in Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, a lot of people speak Hindi as well.
7. No need for Nepali. Most Nepalis can speak and understand Hindi.
8. In South Africa, you just need English. Most people can speak it.
9. Malay and Indonesian are the same too.
10. WIth English and Hindi, you don't need Fijian to speak to majority of Fijians.

[GlaciesYin]

6:07 take it from a Singaporean, you're probably fine with just English. Our mother tongue may be the other three, but many are actually more fluent in English. All schools have taught in english since the 1970s and public infrastructure has pivoted to english as the default language.
A significant portion of old folks who have never learnt english before 50 have had to learn hold basic conversations because their grandchildren are basically only fluent in English (including yours truly)
We're also losing many speakers of other variants as a result. (Baba Malay, Bazaar Malay, languages and dialects from India that are not Tamil/Hindi*, Hakka, older variants of Hokkien, and more)
*edit for clarification

[AoAnli]

The differences between Farsi, Dari and Tajik are so small that you can really only speak one of them and still be understood by the two others. Tajik sort of distinguishes itself bc they use the Cyrillic alphabet when writing, but when it comes to conversation, they're basically the same language. They have different names bc of political reasons

Edit : I forgot to add, Hindi & Urdu are mutually intelligible in their spoken forms (the slight differences is that Urdu has some Persian influence while Hindi stayed closer to Sanskrit). They're considered to be dialects of one unique language (Hindustani). It's a similar story with Thai and Lao, with them both using different writing systems but speakers of either can usually communicate just fine.

Indonesian and Malaysian are in the same boat, with them both being dialects of Malay. It's just that Malaysian got influenced by English and Indonesian by Dutch, but I can speak Indonesian with my friends from Malaysia and we understand each other just fine.

Czech and Slovak are also essentially the same language. The main difference is the accent (I think Slovak has one more vowel sound that Czech doesn't have, but the grammar and vocab is almost exactly the same.) Same goes for Macedonian and Bulgarian, though I can easily tell the difference just bc of the accent. But it's pretty much a Metropolitan French vs Canadian French story where you can tell there's a difference, but it doesn't necessarily make it a whole different language (even if French people struggle to understand Canadian French sometimes). Again, the reason for the different names is political, but they can *generally* understand each other without much of a problem.

[ChasMusic]

This was fascinating, although it offended my statistical sense, since we don't know whether the people in one country that speak X language are different people from the ones that speak Y language. If they're the same people, then you're still below 50%. But as you say, don't take the video too seriously. It was fun.

[ruslan_kasimov]

My father speaks tatar (which is a minority language in Russia and is a turkic language) and he told me that he understood almost everyone easily when he served in the USSR military: uzbeks, kazakhs, azerbaijanis.... The only people he couldn't understand were tajiks since it's a persian language and not turkic language

[misterx]

14:50 English is the common language for everyone in South Africa. I have lived there for all my life and I have never come across one person who could not speak at least basic English regardless of race.

[jeongbun]

Counting Hindi/Urdu and Dari/Farsi/Tajik and Serbo-Croatian ALL as different languages, feels…wrong 😭

[devinmes]

If you ignore dialects for English and French (as they are much more mutually intelligible than other language dialects), exclude Dari and Tajik, and redo the African section to optimize (many languages counted, such as Ewe, technically do not need to be learned if you choose to be more efficient), it's actually 79. Still a lot though.

[gabrieldinix]

Makes me wish for an interactive map that would show how many countries you can speak in the world for the languages you know. Would be an interesting thing about informing yourself on where you can travel and still be able to communicate

[lkniby]

If you learn portuguese, you understand spanish, if you learn spanish, you understand portuguese, The two languages ​​are ridiculously similar and easy to understand once you know the other.

[harrytruman]

4:35 very funnily enough is the case for Sierra Leone. Except almost everyone in Sierra Leone actually *does* speak English, due to it being the official language of government/educational instruction. Haiti's official langauge might be French, but kreyol has been standardized by the government and its used for instruction in schools which isn't the case for Sierra Leone. Also, in Sierra Leone in regions that are further from the metropolitan areas, people tend to be less fluent in English. I actually saw a video my mom showed me once of a woman who only spoke Krio but couldn't speak English, trying to speak English. Her attempts were quite humorous to say the least

[mbg]

So many of those languages are mutually intelligible, but if I say Urdu and Hindi are the same language I can't travel to India or Pakistan without fearing for my life.

[siddhantgarodia]

I think learning English, Mandarin and Hindi can get you to have basic communication with almost 40-50% of the world's population

[alinaqirizvi]

Dari and Tajiki are just dialects of Farsi btw also most of the time Afghanis call their language Farsi rather than Dari as Dari is mainly a political name