Emily Oster, an associate professor of economics at Brown University, has given her opinion as to the most ‘useful’ second language for a native English speaker to learn in 2017.

Oster herself concedes that ‘useful’ is a difficult concept to define, saying: “Making the optimal choice requires thinking about both benefits and costs. I’d argue there may be very different costs to acquiring proficiency in different languages.

“It is a lot harder for most English-speakers to learn Japanese than to learn Spanish.”

Revealed: the best language for English speakers to learn