Parents - Forget about your children learning Mandarin, the future is about French! Merci...

I just read this article on the IFLS website from July 15th about how the world population will decline at some point after 2064 (this might still come too late to do anything about Climate Change). This would be the first time this happens in the absence of a global famine, pandemic (hold that thought...), war, etc... but rather because of the lowered fertility rates. Here is the full article for your perusal (https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/for-the-first-time-in-centuries-the-worlds-population-will-decline-in-next-few-decades/):

Make no mistake about it, there are great benefits to learning a second (or third/fourth/etc... language). I am in the process of spending time learning Japanese in order to complement my panoply of foreign languages. So I am all for this endeavor. One can make a very valid argument that learning programming languages is equally (if not more) valuable. So go for it. 

From an economic perspective the greatest bang for your buck is learning English of course. That explains why countries around the world who don't have English as their national language focus on this and often have extraordinary English speaking skills (exhibit A: hop on a plane/train/automobile and head over to Scandinavia to see this for yourself). Once you have English down and your home language down, where to go next?

Back in the 1980s the language of the future was Japanese, as that country was at the tail end of it's remarkable economic growth which led it to become the world's second largest economy, reaching about 40% of that of the USA. Fast forward to today and Mandarin appears to have become the language of the future. On the surface that makes sense as the Chinese economy is about to overtake that of the US at some point by the next decade. But wait a minute, I would like to make an argument for French instead.

The first argument is that population growth is greatly in favor of the French speaking world than Mandarin. According to the current projected growth (and declining) rates, the population of China should peak at a bit over 1.4 billion people and will fall to less than a billion (possibly down 50%) by 2100. On the flip side, Sub Saharan Africa will see it's population explode and triple from 1 billion to 3 billion this century alone. Over 1,000 languages are spoken there and English is very popular in many of those countries. French is a close second.

The second argument is that French has a large footprint both geographically and economically. French is spoken on all 5 continents. Mandarin is basically spoken in China, Taiwan and Singapore. Very important mind you, but very limited in nature too. French is also spoken in countries that control 20% of world GDP. That's pretty good too.

Thirdly, don't take it from me. The British Council issued a report in 2017 on the languages of the future and... French came out on top! Granted this is from a British centric perspective, but still. Here is an excerpt (https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/languages_for_the_future_2017.pdf):

In conclusion, go for it. Parents, please push your children to learn more than one language. I would never say no to that. However I just wanted to highlight that Mandarin is not the obvious choice and that French should be seriously considered!

Merci...