Most useful languages for world travel

A reader writes:

I enjoy your blog, especially your focus on privacy issues, and your coverage of "The Amazing Race".

What do you consider to be the most useful languages for a world traveller to know?

Certainly the most useful language to know, if you want to travel to a wide variety of countries around the world, is English. There are few large cities or heavily-touristed places anywhere in the world where you can't find some people who speak at least a little basic tourist English.

There are places where no one speaks any language except the local one(s), but it's possible to communicate basic travel needs ("food", "toilet", "place to sleep", "transport to the place I'm pointing to on this map") with no mutual language at all. A well-designed set of pictographs helps -- the best are the laminated Kwikpoint cards, and I'd rate them an absolute "must", if they are allowed, for contestants on "The Amazing Race". You'll get more out a visit if you know a language understood by at least some of the locals, but not knowing any locally-understood language shouldn't stand in the way of going wherever you really want to go.

That said, the most useful languages other than English for world travellers are those that are:

1. used by at least a significant subset of people
2. throughout a large area
3. where English isn't widely used.

Depending on the region of the world in which you are most interested (and leaving aside the varying difficulty of learning different languages),
that would include:

• Spanish (useful throughout Latin America -- even in Brazil spoken Spanish is widely understood, and knowledge of written Spanish is adequate for understanding much written Portuguese)

• Mandarin (useful throughout East Asia, and to a lesser degree in mnay other places)

• Russian (English is not widely spoken in the former USSR, and some people speak Russian in surprisingly many other places)

• Arabic (used as a second language by the literate classes throughout the Islamic world, even where Arabic isn't the primary language)

Other less widely useful possibilities (either less widely spoken, or spoken in places where English is more common) would include:

• French (mainly useful in west and central Africa, but losing ground rapidly to English)

• Hindi or Urdu (useful in a large region of South Asia, but in most of that region it's relatively easy to get around in English)

• Swahili (ditto in eastern Africa)

• German (the lingua franca and most common second language of much of central Europe, having largely displaced Russian in that role over the last decade)

I invite readers to add their additional suggestions in the comments.