Languages are a huge part of how we communicate and understand each other. Using data from the language database Ethnologue, we ranked the 33 most spoken languages in the world by number of native speakers. English leads the pack in terms of total number of speakers (both native and non-native). Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and French round out the top five.
English
English is the most spoken language in the world, with over a billion native speakers. It is the language of business, travel, and international communication in general. This is largely due to British imperialism, which brought it to many parts of the world.
Mandarin Chinese and Spanish round out the top three most spoken languages in the world, followed by Hindi and French. French is unique in that it’s spoken on five continents, mostly as a second language. This is likely due to a large number of French-based creoles in colonized countries. Russian follows, as it is the official language of several countries. Bengali, also known as Bangla, rounds out the top ten most spoken languages in the world by native speaker count.
Chinese
According to online language learning tool Babbel, Chinese (which includes Mandarin and a wide variety of dialects) has the most speakers worldwide — that’s 1.42 billion people. However, if you narrow down the definition to only include native speakers, then English takes the top spot.
All Chinese varieties use tones, which are pronounced as pitch accents over specific syllables. They are highly intelligible among themselves, but not as well with languages from other branches, such as New Xiang Chinese with Southwestern Mandarin or some divergent Hakka dialects with Gan. Japanese, Punjabi and French round out the top five on this list of most spoken languages based on native speaker counts.
Spanish
Language is the primary means of communication between people. It’s no surprise that English takes the lead when it comes to total speakers, followed by Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Spanish. But the list changes depending on how you measure the world’s languages, including how many native or second-language speakers you consider. For example, a language such as Swahili (of which there are 77 million speakers) is ranked sixth by number of native speakers but eighth when counting only second-language speakers.
Spanish is a global language and the most-spoken of the Romance languages. But it is also very different across the 20 countries where it is spoken.
Hindi
A form of Hindustani, Hindi is a language with an estimated 182 million native speakers. It is a widely understood language that can take on the forms of regional dialects and varieties of other Indian languages. Its vocabulary is derived mainly from Sanskrit, although it has taken wordfinder from other languages. It has two grammatical genders, and inflicts for number, case, tense, mood, and aspect. It is the language that gave us shampoo, jungle, jodhpurs, and bungalows!
It is the most popular language in India, and it is also used as a second language in Nepal, Fiji, and many countries around the world.
Bengali
Bengali (, endonym Bangla) is an Indo-Aryan language that serves as the primary language of Bangladesh and parts of India. It is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages and also one of its most poetic. Unlike in Latin scripts, where letter forms stand on an invisible baseline, Bengali letters hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right head stroke called a matra. Bengali has several diacritics for indicating nasalization of vowels and sounds, as well as other phonetic variations.
Bengali is known for its rich lexicon, which has absorbed words from Hindi, Assamese, and the local Austroasiatic languages of Bangladesh, along with Persian, Arabic, and European languages due to centuries of close contact. Its morphology is highly inflected for person, tense, aspect, and honorifics.
Thai
Thai is a tonal language, meaning that the meaning of a word can change depending on the tone and stress used in its pronunciation. For example, the word suea may mean ‘clothing’ when pronounced with low stress and a rising tone but ‘tiger’ when spoken with a high tone and falling tone. The number of Russian speakers has declined slightly since the previous edition of Ethnologue, putting it at number 8 on our list of most spoken languages in the world. However, it is still a powerful and influential language.
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