Prestige languages of the world, ca. 1930

I am a linguistics nerd, and I totally sweat the details on this stuff.

The languages of the empires

There are a few languages that are obvious to want to learn: the languages of the great empires.

French: Le Seigneur let la francophonie sont partout. French is almost as ubiquitous as English was in 1900 IRL; on top of that, it's also the language of diplomacy and culture in western Europe.

• French is the dominant European language of India. Even northern India, which has managed to shake every colonial attempt to date. Foreigners aren't called Firangi for nothing.
• A fair bit of America was France-Outremer or something like that, until it changed hands in the 1740s. After Moorish, French (or at least a recognizable dialect of the same) is the de facto second language of the UCNA.
• France also claimed a swathe of Australia's* western coastline until a shakeup in the 19th century [when?]. Even after that change of hands, it remains the only Francophone part of the Anglo-Scottish world.

Moorish: Moorish as a major language of the world goes back essentially to 1484, when the New World was discovered and the Mozarabs began an aggressive missionary effort. Moorish as a prestige language of the world is much more recent, and its success is overwhelmingly linked to the rise of the UCNA.

• Moorish is the language of New World diplomacy. There are three regional powers native to the continent - the UCNA, the G.P. of Mexico, and Gran Peru - and all three of them speak Moorish.
• Seville had a decent empire in North Africa as well; the Morophone world ends somewhere a few days' travel south of the Atlas Mountains.
• Oh yeah, Moorish is also spoken in southern Spain too, where it originated from. All those international populations are a big part of why Mahdism is such a headache for the Spanish Crown.

English: The Anglophone world is quite a bit smaller in Andalusada (for one thing, the Louisiana Purchase was never sold), but the Imperial Union of England and Scotland is still a contender against France.

• Where French is the language of Indian empire, English is the language of African. How much moreso? Let's put it this way: most of the CFA nations, or at least most of most of the CFA nations. (The exact borders are probably quite different.)
• In the UCNA, English is something along the lines of Spanish IRL: a language associated with immigration from the countries across the border.

Russian: "The other imperial language." Russian is the one that's always left off the lists, simply because a lot of those lists are compiled by people who don't share borders with Russians - but it crops up in a lot of interesting places.

• Russian is the language to learn if you're in Korea. Since the modernization began in the 1860s, Korea has steadily and eagerly built itself up; the language of Western education, modern technology, the True Church, and even time itself were all learned from the universities between Tver and Pleskov. Korea has seen the future, and it is written in Cyrillic. (Or was, until relatively recently...)
• The northern, mostly Ezoic half of the Japonic diaspora speaks Russian in public, and their "native language" only at home. The Meammosiran Cossacks are a particularly notable example of this. (This is causing the Japanese educational system no shortage of headaches.)
• Since the Revolution, and in particular since the rise of the Technical Censors, Russian is establishing itself as the language of mad science. (There's a fair number of expat engineers who are looking for financial backers to make their world-changing devices take off, and then oh yes I'll show them, I'll show them all...)

Portuguese: Least of the empires, and most badly weakened by the interesting times that came upon Iberia in the 18th century.

• Unsurprisingly, Portuguese is the language of the G.P. of Cabralia, and for that matter the primary language of most of Cabralia outside the Andes. (It's also the language of the CRC, and even though the CRC also claims to speak Moorish as a co-official language, nobody's fooled.)
• Outside of the New World, Portuguese is also spoken in the Philippines*, and is scattered across a fair bit of the Pacific Ocean too.
• Historically, Portuguese was the European language that most impacted Taiwanese*. A fair number of older Takasagonese speak it fluently, although it's giving way to English.

Low German: The Germans never got around to building a colonial empire during the age of exploration, but there is a global German diaspora - and the Baltdeutschen are hugely overrepresented within that diaspora.

• The House of Sansinger's founding fathers were both part of the Baltic diaspora. While they've mostly assimilated, they do make a point of passing it down to their children, and it is studied in both Cabralia and Mexico.
• The Thaghr ash-Shamal was colonized by Pomeranian refugees. Their descendants, now a sovereign state of their own, continue to speak Pommersch.

Second-tier languages

Those five languages are the ones that people study because they're globally useful. There are some others that aren't, though.

Latin: Latin's still a language of education in Andalusada. The world is considerably more Catholic than is ours, and there's no guarantee that Güntherites have abandoned it either.

• Latin is the language of the Church. Full stop. In a world that has many more Catholics than IRL, Latin can double as an auxiliary language in an astonishing number of places.
• One thing that Latin isn't, quite as much, is the language of science. I'm not sure how the naming conventions of the history of science play out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it may use a fair bit more Greek (and possibly even some Latinized Arabic.) On which note...

Andalusi Arabic: What Latin is to Christendom, Arabic sort of is to the Islamic world. Fus'a obviously hasn't changed much, and remains the language of scholarship; what I'm going to focus on is Andalusi Arabic.

• In the UCNA, Andalusi Arabic is the language of classical haute couture. You know all those books you know by title, but have never actually read? Don Quixote, say, the other two volumes of the Commedia, the Genji Monogatari? All of those books are written in Andalusi Arabic, a language that you probably can't read. (Bit by bit, they're being translated.)
• Andalusi Arabic is also the language of aristocracy. Some of the more bitterly conservative khassa expats refuse to let their daughters marry anybody who doesn't speak Andalusi, and are more willing to accept refugees from the Old Country into their extended social network than new-money captains of industry or whatever.
• Andalusi is the language of Mahdism. Any true Mahdist pretender will speak it. Even the Yusufids still speak it amongst themselves, and they (except for the Sufyanids, of course) have never been legitimate Mahdist heirs.

High German: The Holy Roman Empire may live only vicariously, and they may have never gone empire-building, and Pomerania (military hardass it may be) may speak Low German ever since the sansingers took over, but High German still managed to consolidate itself pretty thoroughly. Very simply there've been a lot of Germans making a lot of alliances over the centuries, and the language isn't going away.

• German's become the neutral language of Central Europe. When Pressburg doesn't want to speak Magyar to their former overlords, and the Hungarians don't deign to acknowledge Slovak self-rule, they curse at each other in German instead.
• Oddly enough, German has a bit of pull in the Red Sea region, in no small part because Saxony owns the Suez Canal.*
• More recently, German is becoming one of the languages of engineering.