Learning a language comes with all kinds of benefits: It has been shown to make you smarter, make your brain more resilient, and open up job opportunities.
All that doesn’t answer the question of which language to learn, though. Here’s some data that can help you make that decision: Adzuna, a job-searching site based in the UK, analyzed over a million English-language job postings to find the languages that earn their speakers the highest pay. The list below shows the average pay for jobs, based on language requirements:
English is not included as a language requirement, presumably because the postings were already in English. German came out on top, with an average salary of over £34,000 ($44,000). Four of the top 10 are non-EU languages: Arabic, Japanese, Russian and Mandarin.
There’s more good news for German speakers, too. Adzuna also counted the number of job openings by language, and German again came out on top. Japanese, on the other hand, didn’t make the top 10 in terms of job vacancies.
According to Adzuna, just knowing a language isn’t enough to land most of the jobs found in their database. A second language is most lucrative, said representative Stephen Pritchard, when paired with other skills in demand in the market.
