The 100 Most Spoken Languages Around the World

When it comes to most spoken languages in the world one would actually expect English on the front line for like all over the internet most language used in writing articles nowadays is English. 

Even though you’re reading this article in English, there’s a good chance it might not be your mother tongue. Of the billion strong English speakers in the world, only 33% consider it their native language. 

The popularity of a language depends greatly on utility and geographic location. Additionally, how we measure the spread of world languages can vary greatly depending on whether you look at total speakers or native speakers. 

Today’s detailed visualization from WordTips illustrates the 100 most spoken languages in the world, the number of native speakers for each language, and the origin tree that each language has branched out from. 

How Do You Define A Language? 

The data comes from the 22nd edition of Ethnologue, a database covering a majority of the world’s population, detailing approximately 7,111 living languages in existence today. 

The definitions of languages are often dynamic, blurring the lines around a singular understanding of what makes a language;

•Linguistic: focused on lexical and grammatical differences, or on variations within speech communities. 

•Social: focused on cultural or political factors, as well as heritage and identity. 

For the purposes of measurement, the researchers use the ISO 693-3 set of criteria, which accounts for related varieties and dialects-ensuring that linguistics are not the only factor considered in this count of languages. 

Let’s now dive into the top 10 most spoken languages overall.  

The most common language in the world is English, with the majority of speakers knowing English as their second language.

How many people in the world speak English? In total, English has more than 1.13 billion speakers, with more than 379 million speaking it as their native language.

English is a part of the Indo-European language tree, which also contains some of the other top languages in the world, like Spanish and French. 

English has split off into pidgin and creole languages itself as a result of colonialism, like the Jamaican Patois, Nigerian Pidgin, and Singlish. 

English also happens to be the top language used on websites by the vast majority of users (56.1%). Maybe this explains why English is one of the most popular languages in gaming as well. 

Whether it's an online role-playing game or a simple word unscrambler, players from around the globe are using this language to communicate and have fun.  

What Language Has the Most Native Speakers? 

While English has the highest total number of speakers, Mandarin Chinese has the highest number of native speakers. 

How many people speak Mandarin? As a first language, roughly 918 million people speak Mandarin, with more than 1.11 billion total speakers worldwide. 

Mandarin Chinese includes a multitude of dialects, such as Standard Chinese, which is the official state language of the Chinese government, and the Beijing dialect. This may seem like a lot of people, but 30% of the country’s population does not speak Mandarin.

Many other languages are also commonly used in the Sino-Tibetan world language tree. Map out the Sino-Tibetan language family tree and one can see the rich variety of Chinese languages. 

It might be upsetting to find out, however, that dozens of them are in danger of extinction. 

The Top 5 Languages in the World by Total Speakers. 

•English: 1,132,366,680 total speakers

•Mandarin Chinese: 1,116,596,640 total speakers

•Hindi: 615,475,540 total speakers

•Spanish: 534,335,730 total speakers

•French: 279,821,930 total speakers 

NB: Indo-European languages have the widest spread worldwide. According to Ethnologue, the language family contains over 3 billion speakers in total. Interestingly, there are actually 1,526 Niger-Congo languages altogether, though only 12 are represented here. 

CONCLUSION 

The Ethnologue 200

For over 15 years, they have published list of the largest languages in the world – often cited by top tier publications. 

The Ethnologue 200 accounts for most of the world's population. Over 88% of people speak one of these languages as their native tongue, and many hundreds of millions more speak them as second languages. This ranking accounts for both, showing the total usage worldwide. 

This is to mean that Great knowledge comes with great research, in your research you can come across different websites and blogs that give almost similar content.