The Portuguese language is the 6th language most useful for business, according to the last Bloomberg Rankings. Portuguese, the official language of 8 countries, is the 6th most spoken language in the world by 176 million in 33 countries.

Mandarin Chinese is the top language for business worldwide after English the primary language for business, spoken by 845 million people in the world’s second-largest economy. English is spoken by 341 million in 104 countries.

French was ranked number three followed by Arabic. French is spoken by 68 million people worldwide and the official language of 27 nations. Arabic, which is spoken by 221 million people, is the official language in 23 nations, according to Bloomberg.

Spanish ranked number four despite being the official language of 20 countries and spoken by over 329 million people. Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Italian, Korean, and Turkish followed.

Research from the Modern Language Association reports Spanish as the top foreign language studied in U.S. colleges in 2009, according to a study published in December 2010.

Spanish (no.1) topped that list with 864, 986 enrollments, dwarfing French which followed next with 216, 419 (no. 2), German (no. 3), American Sign Language (no. 4), Italian (no. 5), Japanese (no. 6), Chinese (no. 7), Arabic (no. 8), Latin (no. 9) and Russian (no. 10), Ancient Greek (no.11) Biblical Hebrew (no.12), Portuguese (no.13), and Korean (n0.14).

To create the list, Bloomberg Rankings identified the 25 languages with the greatest number of native speakers, then narrowed the list to the 11 official languages of G20 countries, excluding those that designated English.

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