Languages

Deciding on what languages to use for your IVR does not have to be difficult.

First, you need to decide on what you are trying to accomplish with your IVR. Here are a few common uses:

1. Present a friendlier corporate image at a low cost

2. Generate sales leads in niche ethnic markets

3. Create the impression of a larger footprint

4. Save time to your clients and money for yourself by having live persons handle only calls that cannot be handled by automated attendants

If your intention is to have as many languages as possible, even at the risk of small mistakes in machine translations (in other words, rely on automated translations to communicate with potential customers whose language you do not speak but do not want to be turned away), we can provide some helpful statistics in terms of the most spoken languages, collected mostly from Wikipedia.

Here is George H. J. Weber's report on the number of total speakers of the top languages, published not so long ago.

Language: #Native speakers + #Secondary speakers = Total

Chinese: 1,100 million + 15 million = 1,115 million

English: 330 million + 150 million = 480 million

Spanish: 300 million + 15 million = 315 million

Russian: 155 million + 125 million = 280 million

French: 175 million + 115 million = 290 million

Hindi/Urdu: 250 million, ? ?

Arabic: 200 million + 20 million = 220 million

Brazilian Portuguese: 160 million + 30 million = 190 million

Bengali * 180 million ? ?

Japanese = 110 million + 10 million = 120 million

Punjabi * 90 million ? ?

German: 100 million + 10 million = 110 million

Javanese * 80 million ? ?

(* TTS services not available)

Toronto in Ontario, Canada, is heralded as one of the most diverse and multicultural cities in the world. It makes a lot of sense to look at its demographics to determine language use.

According to Toronto.ca,

• The top 5 mother tongue languages in 2006 were:

  • Chinese (420,000);

  • Italian (195,000);

  • Punjabi * (138,000);

  • Tagalog/Filipino (114,000);

  • Portuguese (113,000).

• Diversity can also be measured by the extent in which people speak another language other than English or French in the home. Thirty-one percent of City residents had a home language other than English or French. The top non-official home languages were: Chinese, Tamil *, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

• Among Chinese speakers who identified a specific dialect, two-thirds spoke Cantonese * and one-third spoke Mandarin.

• Since 1996, the number of persons with Tamil * as a home language has surpassed those who speak Italian while Spanish as a home language has overtaken Portuguese.

Wikipedia has fresher data from the Canadian 2011 census.

Toronto CMA, 2011 | Population | %

English | 2,980,215 | 53.8

Cantonese * | 170,490 | 3.1

Italian | 166,415 | 3.0

Chinese (not specified) | 157,145 | 2.8

Panjabi (Punjabi) * | 153,475 | 2.8

Spanish | 119,965 | 2.2

Tagalog (Pilipino, Filipino) | 119,240 | 2.2

Urdu | 110,255 | 2.0

Tamil * | 105,340 | 1.9

Portuguese | 104,110 | 1.9

Mandarin | 100,050 | 1.8

Persian | 81,015 | 1.5

Russian | 78,105 | 1.4

Polish | 75,275 | 1.4

Arabic | 66,710 | 1.2

French | 63,160 | 1.1

Gujarati * | 58,715 | 1.1

Korean | 51,395 | 0.9

Vietnamese | 45,270 | 0.8

Greek | 42,840 | 0.8

There are some languages (Bengali, Punjabi, Javanese, Gujarati, Tamil and others) we cannot use automatically (we have marked them with "*"); for these, you may provide your own recordings, as explained in our DIY page.