The world is now over 8 billion people, however, while the world’s population is increasing, the number of languages actively spoken worldwide is sadly decreasing. Despite this, there are many languages in the world that are thriving. This article will explain the most spoken languages in the world and give some information about these languages.

What Is The Most Spoken Language In The World? (Native Speakers Only)

The most spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are just under 1 billion native speakers of Mandarin in the world, making it by far the language most spoken by native speakers.

For comparison, the second most spoken language in the world, Spanish, has about half as many native speakers as Mandarin Chinese, at 475 million speakers. Of course, China does have an advantage to some degree, given that its population is 1.4 billion, or about 18% of the total world’s population.

What you may find more interesting however, is the language that has the most speakers if you include non-native speakers. Can you guess what it might be?

What Is The Most Spoken Language In The World When Second Language Speakers Are Counted?

Although Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers, English has the most second-language speakers. When native speakers and second-language speakers are counted, English has 1.4 billion speakers, while Mandarin Chinese has 1.1 billion native and second-language speakers.

There are more English speakers when second-language speakers are included. English is spoken by about 370 million native speakers, with a staggering 1.1 billion second-language speakers.

There are interesting comparisons and contrasts that are possible between these two languages that are so widely spoken. Some of this is listed below. Alternatively, you can scroll past this next heading to reach a table showing the top 20 most spoken languages, ranked by native speakers only, and also ranked by native speakers and second-language speakers.

Most Spoken Languages Ranked

Below you will find two tables. Each table shows the top 20 most spoken languages in the world. I have also made sure that each table includes the 9 easiest languages to learn. The easiest languages to learn are Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Swedish.

Out of these 9 languages, 4 are already included in the top 20 most spoken languages, so there are only 5 extra languages that were needed to be included in this list.

This data is primarily taken from Ethnologue, however, the exact number of speakers of particular languages does seem to be in contention when compared to other sources. This is perhaps due to outdated information, or a lack of recent census data. This information is as of 2022.

Below I have given some information about some of these languages should you wish to know more about them.

Information About Each Of The 20 Most Spoken Languages

You may not know too much about some of these languages listed, even though they’re the most spoken languages in the world! To help with this I have included some short peices of information about each language below.

Each heading will include the language and the current rank of this language for total speakers.

English

Given that this post is written in English, there is probably very little that needs to be said about this langauge.

It may have surprised you to find out that there are more English leaners than native English speakers. This means that English is the most widely spoken language in the world.

Of course the dialects of English spoken in different parts of the world can vary greatly, both in vocabulary, pronunciation as well as some grammar. Many English language learners use American pop culture to learn languages. In the past, it was not uncommon to hear of language learnings using shows such as “Friends” to learn language, including some of the slang. As a note of interest, watching or listening to pop culture in your target language is also a good way for you to be learning a new language as well!

Mandarin Chinese

You may be surpised to know that the number of Mandarin Chinese speakers is not the same as the population of China. This is because there are other dialects of Chinese spoken in China besides Mandarin. Other languages that you may be aware of include Cantonese and Wu, both of which are separately listed in the top 20 list. This is because although they are all used in China and share common aspects, they are mutually unintelligible when spoken.

Thankfully, these languages all use Chinese characters for writing and so communication is still possible between these languages.

English and Chinese Mandarin Compared

These two langauges, depending on your counting method, are the most spoken languages in the world.

The most obvious comparison between these two languages is the distribution of speakers across the world. Mandarin speakers are primarily located in China, while English speakers are spread across the world. Comparatively, you can find English speakers in much of North America, West Europe and Oceania (including Australia and New Zealand).

Despite having a higher number of native speakers, the Chinese language is only used in about 20% of the internet, while English can be found in about 25% – the language with the highest percentage of the internet in its language.

This speaks volumes for the influence of second-language speakers, however, it is possible that as the Chinese population grows, the percentage of internet that is Chinese-based increases and surpasses English.

Hindi

Hindi is a language that is commonly spoken in India as well as a variety of other countries including Fiji, Nepal and Mauritius. The language has around 334 million native speakers worldwide, making it the third most spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese and English.

The Hindi language uses a script called Devanagari which looks quite pretty! The script is written from left to right and employs some letters with dots above them (called matras) which change their pronunciation when they are followed by other letters.

Hindi is an Indo-European language which means that it shares many similarities with other languages such as French, Spanish and Russian. However, there are some differences too: for example, Hindi does not have articles like “the” or “a” – instead it uses words like koi which means “some” or “any” depending on its context.

Spanish

Depending on your historical knowledge of Spainish colonialsim, you may be surprised, or perhaps unsruprised to find that about 549 million people speak the language.

Spanish is an official language in 20 countries, and is used as an official language by the European Union, Mercosur and many other international organizations. In addition, it is one of the six official languages that are given equal status in South Africa (alongside Afrikaans, English, Northern Sotho, Sepedi and Xhosa).

Spanish is also spoken in Spain itself, although you can hear different accents depending on which region you are from. Additionally, Spanish is a language that is widely used throughout Latin America and even some parts of Europe and Africa. This makes it an extremely useful language for those traveling to these regions. There are also a large number of Spanish speakers in the United States, where it is taught as an official language along with English.

Interestingly, there is a part of Spain that speaks in a different language called Catalan. You can find out more about the differences to these two languages here.

It’s also a world-wide language for business, culture, politics and more!

You can find out more about languages specific for travelling to Spain, Mexico or Latin America in this post here. Alternatively, if you’re interested in travelling to Spain itself, you might find these interesting tidbits whet your appetite just a little bit more.

French

One of the other 9 easiest languages to learn, this Romance language is most famous for being known as the language of love. With about 274 million speakers in countries ranging from France, Italy

French is also spoken as a second language in many countries such as Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and Haiti (where it is an official language).

It’s considered one of the 9 easiest languages for English speakers to learn because it shares many similarities with English grammatical structures and vocabulary. There are also many resources online that offer lessons in French for those who wish to learn more about it.

French is an official language in 29 countries, including most of Africa, many countries in West Africa, Central America and South America, as well as parts of Southeast Asia (Vietnam) and Eastern Europe (Belarus).

Looking To Learn?

If you’re looking to learn to speak one of these languages, I encourage you wholeheartedly. While I don’t (yet) have more information about some of these languages, I do have some general tips and tricks floating around. These range from creating your own flashcards for learning, to learning an easy language using Duolingo. If you’ll be learning the language at home, you’ll find this post quite useful in giving you some basic information on where to start.

Happy learning!