One of the first hurdles in identifying the world's most spoken languages is defining what counts as a language. Some sources stick strictly to linguistics, while others incorporate multiple social components. Researchers at Ethnologue calculate that the number reaches 7,139, but only 13 are spoken by more than 100 million people. Would you like to know more?
If someone asks you which is the most spoken language in the world, your first answer is likely to be English, but from a technical point of view... it depends. While English is indeed the most spoken language in total, it has fewer than 380 million native speakers. Under that category, the number one is Mandarin Chinese with more than 917 million, and second place belongs to Spanish, with 460 million people who have it as their primary language.
These are small but important details to better understand the situation of languages on our planet. One of the most important sources tracking their evolution is Ethnologue with more than 15 years of data collection and processing. Updated information is always available on their official website, but last year, the folks at Visual Capitalist prepared an excellent infographic based on 2020 data:
The Most Spoken Languages in the World: The Top 100
Obviously, the infographic confirms all established trends: English is the most spoken language in the world, but it doesn't have as many native speakers as we think. This difference is represented by a circle with a cloud of dots inside. Looking at Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, their dot clouds almost completely cover the circle's diameter. Another similar example is French, with only 77 million native speakers but over 279 million in total (many schools still teach it as a secondary language, and it is official in 29 regions).
A very interesting aspect of the infographic is that it separates languages by their root family. At the top we have the Indo-European family, followed by Sino-Tibetan (here appears Mandarin Chinese), Afro-Asiatic (with 'Standard Arabic' at the head), and Austronesian (Indonesian, Vietnamese, Javanese, and Filipino fit here). Once again, if you need additional details, feel free to visit the Ethnologue page.
Access the infographic: Click here
Visit Ethnologue: Click here
