Over the past month searches for ‘How to learn sign language’ have increased worldwide by 300%. Therefore, it is no surprise that people are turning to TikTok as a form of educating themselves on a critical form of communication.
Interested in sign language’s recent popularity, Revision Centre analysed hashtag data on TikTok to reveal the most desired languages to learn in 2023.
Most popular languages to learn in 2023
| Rank | Language | Total TikTok hashtag views |
| 1 | English | 10.9 billion |
| 2 | Chinese | 2.6 billion |
| 3 | Korean | 2.0 billion |
| 4 | Japanese | 1.2 billion |
| =5 | French | 1.1 billion |
| =5 | Spanish | 1.1 billion |
| 7 | German | 633.8 million |
| 8 | Arabic | 413.8 million |
| 9 | Russian | 296.8 million |
| 10 | Turkish | 233.5 million |
| 11 | Sign language | 65.6 million |
| 12 | Portuguese | 32.2 million |
| 13 | Urdu | 20.4 million |
| 14 | Punjabi | 15.9 million |
| 15 | Hindi | 15 million |
Please find the full data set attached here
Sign language is the 11th most popular language to learn on TikTok
Revision Centre can reveal that sign language is the 11th most popular language to learn on TikTok, with 65.6 million hashtag views for ‘#Learn sign language’. This is around double (33.4 million) more hashtag views than for Portuguese with 32.2 million. With Portuguese being the official language of nine counties including Brazil and Angola, it is quite interesting that sign language has surpassed it’s hashtag views on TikTok.
Sign language is becoming more mainstream with the likes of Rhianna’s Super Bowl interpreter going viral for her impressive performance, and Ed Sheeran’s tour in June 2022 marked the beginning of Wembley Stadium offering sign language at every live concert. It also goes without saying that sign language is becoming popular in the film industry, with The Last of Us cast learning sign language for deaf co-star.
English is the most popular language to learn on TikTok
English is the language people are learning the most on TikTok with 10.9 billion hashtag views for ‘#Learn English’. This is 319% more views than for ‘ #Learn Chinese’ in second place with 2.6 billion hashtag views.
‘#Learn Chinese’ places second with 2.6 billion views, 600 million more hashtag views than ‘#Learn Korean’ in third place. Chinese is spoken in many countries, such as Hong Kong, China, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan. However, With 1.2 billion native speakers, Chinese has the highest prevalence in China.
In third place is ‘ #Learn Korean’ with 2 billion hashtag views on TikTok. This is 800 million more hashtag views than Japanese in fourth place with 1.2 billion views.
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Methodology:
- Revision Centre were keen to find out the languages that people learn the most on the social media platform TikTok.
- To do this, a seed list of the 20 most spoken languages were selected from Lingua.edu.
- Revision Centre then inserted each financial term from the list into TikTok using the hashtag ‘Learn X’ to establish the languages that are most being learned via TikTok.
- All data was collected on 20th February 2023, and is accurate as of then.
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