The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages

I found the following information very interesting!
In 1997, George Weber created a list of the world’s 10 most influential languages. In order to come up with this list, Weber first determined that the following languages are the most spoken in the world. The numbers in parenthesis indicate the number of native speakers for each language.
1. Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion)
2. English (330 million)
3. Spanish (300 million)
4. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
5. Arabic (200 million)
6. Bengali (185 million)
7. Portuguese (160 million)
8. Russian (160 million)
9. Japanese (125 million)
10. German (100 million)
11. Punjabi (90 million)
12. Javanese (80 million)
13. French (75 million)
Then Weber figures out the number of second language speakers for each language and added that number to the number of native speakers, and he came up with the following results.
1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
2. English (480 million)
3. Spanish (320 million)
4. Russian (285 million)
5. French (265 million)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
7. Arabic (221 million)
8. Portuguese (188 million)
9. Bengali (185 million)
10. Japanese (133 million)
11. German (109 million)
Weber then looked at the number of countries that officially speak each language in his list.
1. English (115)
2. French (35)
3. Arabic (24)
4. Spanish (20)
5. Russian (16)
6. German (9)
7. Mandarin (5)
8. Portuguese (5)
9. Hindi/Urdu (2)
10. Bengali (1)
11. Japanese (1)
After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige), Weber compiled the following list of the world's ten most influential languages. The numbers in parenthesis indicate the number of points given by Weber to each language when weighing the six factors.
1. English (37)
2. French (23)
3. Spanish (20)
4. Russian (16)
5. Arabic (14)
6. Chinese (13)
7. German (12)
8. Japanese (10)
9. Portuguese (10)
10. Hindi/Urdu (9)
Initially I was thinking Chinese was the language to learn! I wished I had paid more attention to French in high school.
This is definitely a good list to keep in mind when thinking about learning a second language!
REFERENCE:
George Weber. Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages. Language Today; Vol. 2, Dec 1997.