Recently a child asked, “Why we don’t speak Chinese since China is so big?” What a huge question.
China is a billion people but Chinese has 8 major dialects (in mainland China alone). China was isolated from the rest of the world for many years and that certainly contributed to the fact that Chinese is mostly spoken by those of Chinese descent, although that is changing.
Mandarin Chinese is the #1 spoken language in the world at 13.7% of the world's population, Spanish is 2nd at 5.1%. English is #3 at 4.8% (according to the 2006 CIA World Factbook). 785 million people in the world are illiterate (CIA World Factbook, 2005 estimate). That is about about 12% of the world, but almost 17% of those over 15. India and China have most of the world's illiteracy (going along with their massive populations).
April 2006's WIRED magazine had an article titled "The Mandarin Offensive: Inside Beijing's global campaign to make Chinese the number one language in the world." by Michael Erard that may also be of interest.
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Interesting. Most of the really ambitious Americans I meet are learning Spanish (which is really becoming essential just to survive in the USA, especially in the Southwest and Florida), with Chinese becoming very popular as well. German's also a biggie b/c it's so used in Europe esp. in Eastern Europe (and French still has some lingering popularity). Japanese is still popular-- such an amazing culture they have there.
Still, looks like the "Big Troika" in the US is Spanish (in a class by itself and becoming more of a "native" and less of a "foreign" language anymore), Chinese, maybe German too. They'll take you far.
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