My opinion:

1.English

2.Spanish

3.French

4.Mandarin Chinese

5.Russian



These are the top 5 most influential languages in my opinion. Feel free to list yours.

I wouldn't say they're all influential, though I'd agree they're all important ones to learn. English has pretty much lapped those other languages a few times over in terms of world-wide influence.

Good list.

definately not french.

1. English
2. Latin
3. Spanish
4. Chinese
5. Arabic

Latin?? Hasn't that been dead for centuries now? However Arabic is a good choice but there are so many differences from region to region it would be hard to keep up with.

Why not? Its spoken alot throughout Africa, Canada, some in the Carribean, French Guyana, in some pockets throughout southeast Asia, and of course France. Its almost if not as popular and widely spoken as Spanish.

^ you gotta be kidding. heres a decent primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ative_speakers

secondly, spanish speaking countries are a hell of a lot more developed generally than french speaking ones. aside from quebec and france itself, french speaking countries are bottom of the barrel third world shitholes. if talking to third worlders is your thing, then urdu, bahasa, hindi, punjabi, tagalog, and bengali would not only reach a similarly wide (or wider) audience, but the third worlders youd be talking with would be better educated, healthier, and basically its more likely you'd be talking with them in the first place.

Russian, you have to be joking.

Why is everyone forgetting Japanese?

Latin is probably the second most important language for any English speaker to know next to English. Latin gives further insight into the structure of language and so learning Latin grammatical constructs help us understand our own English grammatical constructs. Latin is also the source of lot of jargon and other English words. In studying it, you should also become introduced to much of the Classical culture alluded to in so many modern works. You also sound smart if you say you study Latin even though it's much easier to learn Latin than many of the Eastern languages. It's really good to learn it.

Even though Latin is a dead language and nobody speaks it, you'll still use it more than any other foreign language. Ask yourself how many times a day you could see yourself speaking Arabic. Those languages are good to learn if you want to be a linguist. For the majority of the population, such foreign languages would not be useful in a daily context and only useful to professional linguists. You'd use Latin in so many more times than other languages.

Spanish is third on the list because it is the most likely language to be used by Americans. Still, I wouldn't expect it to be used by Americans in everyday speech. But it can still help us better understand the growing Hispanic population in the United States.

Keep in mind that this is a list for Americans. America is pretty much an island, although not physically, but still separated from Canada and Mexico, its only neighbors. Canada speaks English (except those Quebecans) and Mexico speaks Spanish. That doesn't provide a lot of lingual diversity. You might know people who speak Spanish or Korean or Vietnamese or Arabic or Chinese but no matter what they speak, it is most likely unnecessary to speak their language because they probably either know English or aren't worth talking to.

For Europeans, the list would be highly different. Europeans are within close driving, biking, maybe walking distance of other nations who speak different languages. They are not at all isolated from each other and are become increasingly united by the growing authority of the European Union. It might be beneficial for them to learn the languages of their neighboring countries if they care at all about traveling. I, on the other hand, am a ignorant, fat, and lazy American who happens to be too good to look at your ridiculous languages and doesn't care about traveling to Europe.

Depends if we're going by 'most influential' or 'most important to learn'.

I agree, Russian isn't very influential at the moment, but there's definetly scope for it to be. Given their economic reform, oil wealth, amount of natural resources .etc, Russia is going to be a very big force in the near future.

A lot of current developing countries are turning away from the 'western world', and Russia and China are using tis to expand their influence.

So yes, in the business world, Russian will be very important in the future.

In terms of tourism though - not so much.