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What Are The Most Widely Spoken Languages?

What are the most widely spoken languages in the world? Well, some of them are no-brainers, like English! Or maybe you were thinking Chinese, and yes that`s one of them. But what other languages are spoken by similarly staggering numbers of people? Let`s look at the top most commonly spoken languages.

We can answer this question in two ways: by number of native speakers, or by total number of speakers – since some languages are used as lingua-francas by non-native speakers. Let`s examine both.

Here is a list of the top languages based on number of native speakers:

Map of most widely spoken languages1) Mandarin Chinese (900-955 million)

2) Spanish (407 million)

3) English (359 million)

4) Hindi / Urdu (335 million)

5) Arabic (293 million)

6) Portuguese (216 million)

7) Bengali (206 million)

8) Russian (155 million)

9) Japanese (126 million)

10) Punjabi (102 million)

 

Mandarin is by far the most widely spoken native language, but keep in mind that this includes a large group of Mandarin dialects. But what makes this list most questionable is that the number of native speakers could be radically different from the number of proficient speakers. Some languages are spoken more widely by second language speakers than they are by native speakers. For example, Malay/Indonesian has a relatively small number of native speakers, but as the official language and lingua franca of Indonesia, it is spoken by around 250 million people in total (but the numbers could possibly be as high as 290 million depending on how proficiency is measured), putting it close to the top of the list. French also moves much higher on the list when we include all the second language speakers in Africa and other former colonies (mostly in Africa). So let`s look at a list that includes both native speakers and proficient second language speakers:

Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia1) Mandarin (1150 million)

2) English (1500 – 2000 million)

3) Hindi/Urdu (540 million)

4) Spanish (530 million)

5) Arabic (422 million)

6) Russian (260 million)

7) Portuguese (250-260 million)

8) Malay/Indonesian (250 million)

9) Bengali (226 million)

10) French (220 million)Map of French language

This list gives us a slightly better idea of which languages are most widely spoken. The notable changes are the prominence of French, and the appearance of Malay/Indonesian which push other languages like Japanese off the list.

Being the most widely spoken languages doesn`t necessarily make these the most important languages in the world.