A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Top Ten Spoken Languages

Mandarin Chinese (1.1 Billion Speakers)
Mandarin Chinese (1.1 Billion Speakers)

Nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly a billion). Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups, spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area, stretching from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast.

image: playbuzz.com
English (983 Million Speakers)
English (983 Million Speakers)

The next biggest South Asian language is Telugu, which is a Dravidian language (meaning that, unlike the first three, it has no known relation to English). Telugu is the third most-common language in India, spoken mainly in the southeast of the country.

Hindustani (544 Million Speakers)
Hindustani (544 Million Speakers)

Would you like to learn one of the most spoken languages in the world? ... Hindustani (544 million speakers) ... Did any of the top 10 most spoken languages surprise you?

image: qz.com
Spanish (527 Million Speakers)
Spanish (527 Million Speakers)

Number of non-native speakers: 91 million Total number of speakers: 527 million Language family: Romance, a sub-family of Indo-European. Related to: French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian Name in the language itself: español or castellano ¡Sí señor! By number of native speakers, Spanish is the second biggest language in the world (behind only Mandarin).

image: yougov.co.uk
Arabic (422 Million Speakers)
Arabic (422 Million Speakers)

Arabic and its different dialects are spoken by around 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world as well as in the Arab diaspora making it one of the five most spoken languages in the world.

Malay (281 Million Speakers)
Malay (281 Million Speakers)

Would you like to learn one of the most spoken languages in the world? ... Malay (281 million speakers) ... Did any of the top 10 most spoken languages surprise you?

Russian
Russian

Of all the languages of Russia, Russian is the only official language at the national level. There are 35 different languages which are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian. There are over 100 minority languages spoken in Russia today.

Bengali (261 Million Speakers)
Bengali (261 Million Speakers)

Would you like to learn one of the most spoken languages in the world? ... Bengali (261 million speakers) ... Are you surprised by any of the the most spoken languages?

Chinese
Chinese

Standard Chinese (known in China as Putonghua), a form of Mandarin Chinese, is the official national spoken language for the mainland and serves as a lingua franca within the Mandarin-speaking regions (and, to a lesser extent, across the other regions of mainland China).

Spanish
Spanish

The languages of Spain (Spanish: lenguas de España), or Spanish languages (Spanish: lenguas españolas), are the languages spoken or once spoken in Spain. Romance languages are the most widely spoken in Spain; of which Spanish, or Castilian, is the only language which has official status for the whole country.

English
English

There are more people who have learned it as a second language than there are native speakers. English is the most commonly spoken language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, and it is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia.

Hindi
Hindi

Individually, as a linguistic variety, Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English. Alongside Urdu as Hindustani, it is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English.

Arabic
Arabic

Non-sovereign entities where Arabic is an official language. As of 2016, there are 9 non-sovereign entities where Arabic is an official language. The following is a list of non-sovereign entities and autonomous regions as well as territories where Arabic is an official or de facto official language.

Portuguese
Portuguese

With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 260 million total speakers, Portuguese is usually listed as the sixth most natively spoken language in the world, the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers, and the most spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere.

Bengali
Bengali

Bengali (/ b ɛ ŋ ˈ ɡ ɔː l i /), also known by its endonym Bangla (/ ˈ b ɑː ŋ l ɑː /; বাংলা ( listen)), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia. It is the official and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India, behind Hindi.

image: quazoo.com
CHINESE: 1197 Million Native Speakers (MANDARIN: 848 Million)
CHINESE: 1197 Million Native Speakers (MANDARIN: 848 Million)

CHINESE: 1197 million native speakers (MANDARIN: 848 million) Linguistically speaking, Chinese is a “macrolanguage” that encompasses dozens of different forms and dialects that together have just short of 1.2 billion native speakers.

SPANISH: 399 Million
SPANISH: 399 Million

Twenty-three languages are spoken as a first language by at least 50 million people each. 2. The largest is the “macrolanguage” of Chinese – spoken natively by 1.2 billion people across Asia. 3. However, Chinese is a tonal language, where pronunciation changes the meaning of the word. Thus, regional dialects are essentially their own sub-language.

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ENGLISH: 335 Million
ENGLISH: 335 Million

MILLION 162 MILLION NATIVE SPEAKERS 162 MILLION 335 MILLION NATIVE SPEAKERS 335 MILLION 260 MILLION NATIVE SPEAKERS 260 MILLION 223 MILLION NATIVE SPEAKERS 223 MILLION 84 SPOKEN LANGUAGES IN THE WORLD 7,000 different languages are estimated to be spoken around the world. But the ten most spoken languages are used natively by close to 40% of the earth’s population.

image: ereforms.org
HINDI: 260 Million
HINDI: 260 Million

LONDON: Hindi is the fourth most common language in the world today. Around 260 million people use it as their mother tongue, after Mandarin Chinese (848 million), Spanish (406 million) and English (335 million). Another Indian language — Bengali has been found to be the world’s seventh most common language spoken by around 193 million people.

image: qz.com
ARABIC: 242 Million
ARABIC: 242 Million

Telugu is the third most-common language in India, spoken mainly in the southeast of the country. It has about 75 million native speakers. That's more than the population of the U.K.! Telugu is the fifteenth most-spoken language worldwide, and has its own rather beautiful writing system.

image: weforum.org
PORTUGUESE: 203 Million
PORTUGUESE: 203 Million

Today, Portuguese and Portuguese-based creoles are official, de-facto official, or co-official languages of Brazil (203 million), Portugal (10.8 million), Mozambique (24.7 million), Angola (24.4 million), Guinea-Bissau (1.7 million), East Timor (1.2 million), Macau (588,000), Verde Islands (538,500), São Tomé and Príncipe (190,400).

BENGALI: 189 Million
BENGALI: 189 Million

With approximately 189 million native and 208 million total speakers worldwide, Bengali is usually counted as the seventh most spoken native language in the world by population.

RUSSIAN: 166 Million
RUSSIAN: 166 Million

Like the overwhelming majority of European languages, Russian can trace its origins all the way back to its prehistoric Indo-European roots. Eventually, as the Slavic tribes began to settle in eastern Europe, their language began to differentiate into what is currently considered the Proto-Slavic ...

source: babbel.com
1 French
1 French

Spoken by 12% of the European Union's population, French is the fourth most widely spoken mother tongue in the EU after German, English and Italian; it is also the third-most widely known language of the Union after English and German (33% of the EU population report knowing how to speak English, 22% of Europeans understand German, 20% French).

2 Italian
2 Italian

In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with over 660,000 speakers (or about 2.1% of the population) according to the 2006 Census.

3 Spanish
3 Spanish

The languages of Spain (Spanish: lenguas de España), or Spanish languages (Spanish: lenguas españolas), are the languages spoken or once spoken in Spain. Romance languages are the most widely spoken in Spain; of which Spanish, or Castilian, is the only language which has official status for the whole country.

4 Portuguese
4 Portuguese

In March 2006, the Museum of the Portuguese Language, an interactive museum about the Portuguese language, was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, the city with the greatest number of Portuguese language speakers in the world. The museum is the first of its kind in the world.

5 Russian
5 Russian

Of all the languages of Russia, Russian is the only official language at the national level. There are 35 different languages which are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian. There are over 100 minority languages spoken in Russia today.

6 Japanese
6 Japanese

Miyako Language in Japan. According to the latest figures, there are approximately 67,000 Japanese residents who speak the Miyako language as either their first or second language. Most of these people are also fluent in Japanese. Miyako is a language spoken in the Miyako Islands, located southwest of the island of Okinawa.

7 English
7 English

With roughly 170 million native speakers as of 2010, Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world. Famed for its inscrutable grammar and quite lovely Cyrillic script, it remains one of the six languages spoken in the UN, and produced the likes of Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Pushkin.

source: babbel.com
8 Ukrainian
8 Ukrainian

The Ukrainian language is the official state language of Ukraine. The language is an East Slavic language that is believed to have evolved from the Old East Slavic language that was spoken in the medieval state of Kievan Rus’.