Author: Learn French With Alexa
Learning a new language is one of the best ways to future-proof yourself. It’s a transferable skill that demonstrates commitment and perseverance. It broadens your horizons, and being bilingual or multilingual will only become more desirable as the world becomes more globalised.
But which language is the best to learn for the future? English has enjoyed more than a hundred years as the global lingua franca. While around 400 million people speak it as a first language, nearly three times that amount have learned English as a second language. As the geopolitical landscape shifts, however, and as artificial intelligence continues to send tremors through the translation industry, more than a few people have started to ask: what comes next?
Many believe English will continue to hold the top spot, being already firmly cemented in international institutions, popular culture and the very fabric of the Internet. 50% of web content is published in English, after all, although the number was as high as 80% in the mid-90s. Some people point to the rise of Spanish or Mandarin Chinese, the latter of which boasts over a billion native speakers. And others even believe that none of these languages will swell in importance, as developments in artificial intelligence render human translation and interpretation pointless – or so the argument goes.
In all likelihood, it seems probable that a few languages will sit side by side at the top of the ladder. It’s often tempting to view the history of languages as a tournament, at the end of which – whether that’s in fifty years or a thousand – only one will survive. After all, while there are around 7,000 languages spoken today, the number is estimated to have been twice as high only 500 years ago. Every two weeks another language dies. At that rate, by 2300 there will be only one language left standing – and that’s assuming the rate doesn’t speed up, as it has done in recent years.
But just as English is so embedded in our globalised world that it’s unlikely to go anywhere for the foreseeable future, you could say the same for some of these other languages. The winners are likely to be those we’ve mentioned above – English, Spanish, Chinese – and, of course, French.
Why French? It’s true, I’m a French teacher, and I wear my biases on my sleeve. But it also means I’m aware of developments in the language, and the way it is used. I have students from all across the world, from Canada and Cameroon to India and Australia, and they tell me how learning French has improved their employment prospects and helped them prepare for the future. Many of them wish to immigrate to a country with a strong economy and better quality of life, and they see French as the key to achieving their dreams.
Take Canada for instance. The country is looking to accept around 400,000 new immigrants per year over the next few years. But what many people don’t realise is that Canada is officially bilingual, and nearly a quarter of the population speak French as their first language. After a saturation of English-speaking foreign workers, Canada is now prioritising French speakers.
Canada isn’t the only country where French shares ‘official language’ status with another, or multiple, languages. People forget that Belgium is officially trilingual, and that 40% of the population speak French. In Switzerland, which has four official languages, French is on the rise. While only 18% of the population spoke the language in 1970, the share was 23% in 2023, and looks set to continue to rise. Meanwhile, in many countries where French isn’t an official language, the language of Molière still dominates school curricula. In many non-Francophone European countries, for instance, French is studied by most school students, with more than 80% of secondary pupils learning French in Romania and 54% of upper secondary pupils learning French in Cyprus, as of 2023. Likewise, in the former French colonies of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, as in Italy and Finland, French remains one of the most popular school subjects.
But if we’re talking about population size, then Africa takes the lion’s share of French speakers around the world. Of the 29 countries where French is an official language, 20 are located in Africa. More than half of the 334 million people who speak French as their first language live on the continent, a number that is expected to rise to more than 600 million in 2050, as these regions are projected to see some of the highest population growth in the world over the next few decades. Couple that with expected economic and technological growth, and the obvious conclusion presents itself: French is only going to grow in importance.
Meanwhile, Francophone culture is taking the world by storm. France, Canada and Switzerland occupy the sixth, seventh and eighth places respectively in the 2025 Soft Power report, which measures the cultural presence and pull factor of different nations. French-language music is experiencing an all-time high, as is the French film industry, and people are increasingly wanting to experience their favourite song, movies and TV shows in the original language.
It helps, of course, that it’s easier to do that in 2025 than ever before, thanks to the abundance of French educational content on social media, YouTube and the web generally. Meanwhile, new developments in artificial intelligence have led to new ways to learn the language. The notion that A.I. renders learning a new language pointless is nonsense; au contraire, it makes learning that much easier.
As time goes on, as demographics change and new technologies emerge, the merits of learning French will only become clearer.
Author: Learn French With Alexa
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