The Economist recently published an interesting piece on languages.
People typically rank languages according to how many people on the planet speak them. Here’s another perspective:
“In December came a new approach. A group of scholars* approached the task by first looking at how languages are connected to one another, rather than viewing them in isolation. They then decided to see if this was a good predictor of how many famous people spoke a given language. If a language is well connected to others (a “hub” language with many bilinguals), its speakers will tend to be famous. And the names of the connected languages turn out to be rather interesting.” Read more here.