I read an article about the three best languages for your career. I was surprised. What do you think they were, without looking online?

quote:

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I'll guess English, Mandarin and Farsi.

Any more guesses?

Without actually guessing any languages. I'll guess that it depends who you ask and where you look. (Not to mention where you live!)

quote:

I'll guess that it depends who you ask and where you look. (Not to mention where you live!)

Ditto. Plus what your career is.

And, Bob, you are the one who always is asking us to guess. Tsk, tsk tsk.

I just wanted your opinions anyway. This wasn't a right or wrong sort of thing.

My source suggests:

Portuguese

Portuguese comes in third place in our rankings. It has 203 million speakers worldwide, and one of the highest median annual salaries on our list, Portuguese easily outshines almost all other languages. Most Americans study Spanish, not Portuguese, giving Portuguese speakers a competitive edge in the job market. Even better, jobs requiring Portuguese pay a median salary of $42,500—$6,000 a year more than jobs requiring Spanish.

German

German takes second place. The language had the fourth-highest number of job postings in the markets we surveyed. And U.S. jobs demanding German proficiency pay more than those for any other language—a median of $52,000 a year. And while German has a reputation of being among the hardest European languages, it is still easier than the language in our number one spot.

Mandarin

The very best language you can learn to bolster your career? It’s Mandarin, the most popular of all Chinese languages, with more than a billion speakers worldwide. In 2014, there were more than 21,000 job openings for Chinese speakers in the U.S. alone. Demand for Chinese speakers is even greater abroad, especially in booming Asian economies, including China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. If you do decide to learn Chinese, prepare to study hard; this tonal language is consistently ranked as one of the most difficult ones for English speakers.

Portuguese surprised me the most.

Various sources have

Chinese/German/Portuguese
or
Spanish/French/German
or
Spanish/French/Chinese
or
Chinese/French/Arabic
or
Chinese/Arabic/Spanish
or
German/Spanish/Japanese

It's such a mixed bag that any guess is probably as good as any other guess and the variables are immense. If you are in the USA and looking at the home market then Spanish must surely top the list. For the South American market then both Spanish and Portuguese. For Europe it would probably be French and German. It depends on so many things.

I would have expected Spanish/Chinese (though maybe Mandarin)/Hindi. Here is a list of the most popular languages.

I don't get Portuguese. It must be South America?

Brasil is the South American industrial powerhouse, and the speak Portugoose.

Yes, I suppose in the future it will be important, but it doesn't seem to be a world powerhouse now.