If you want a language that will open up whole continents to you, Spanish is your best bet. If we were only to look at native speakers, Spanish has its nose in front of English with about 471 million speakers. Seeing as Chinese is a tonal language that uses thousands of logograms, it will certainly keep you busy.
If you wish to learn a language that one in six people in the world speak, this is the one for you. Numbers vary widely - Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 1.1 billion of whom speak Mandarin - but there’s no doubt it’s the most spoken language in the world. When tallied according to number of native speakers only, these are the most spoken languages in the world. Top 10 Languages By Number Of Native Speakers The numbers below are taken compiled by Ethnologue, which is widely considered the most complete language data source currently in existence.īut then again, who doesn’t love a good list? So we’ve compiled two versions for you. We haven’t even yet acknowledged the unreliability of data sources, collected at different times by different institutions. “Hindi” is also used as a catchall term to cover numerous dialects and sub-dialects. More troubling is the fact that what we refer to simply as “Chinese” is actually a whole family of languages conveniently lumped into a single category. What constitutes a language or a dialect is hotly contested stuff. One small caveat: Assigning hard data, in the form of “X million native speakers,” to any of these languages is practically impossible. We can say with some confidence that Mandarin, English, Spanish and Arabic will make an appearance (and roughly in what order), but there are some surprises, too! Would you have guessed that Bengali is in the top 10 most spoken languages? Determining what are the most spoken languages in the world is a more difficult task than you might imagine.
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