We are in the era of learning languages because it is a way to expand communication with people. Not only do you have to limit yourself to people who understand your mother tongue, but if you learn more languages you may have the opportunity to broaden your interpersonal horizons. This, of course, is a good opportunity both personally and at work. If you want to learn a language but don't know which one to choose, don't miss which are the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Determining which are the most widely spoken languages in the world is difficult to determine, although today we will talk about some of them. We can say with some confidence that Mandarin, English, Spanish and Arabic are among the most widely spoken languages in the world.
It is difficult to establish specific statistics since it is constituted by a language or a dialect is something very disputed nowadays. For example, what we call simply "Chinese" is actually an entire family of languages grouped into a single category. This means that the data is approximate, but quite reliable!
Top 5 languages by number of native speakers
To make the list it is a good idea to take into account the number of native speakers only. Once we know that we are guided by this, we can identify some of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Chino
Approximately XNUMX billion people speak Mandarin, but there is no doubt that it is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you want to learn a language spoken by one in six people in the world, this is the language for you. Seeing as Chinese is a tonal language that uses thousands of logograms, it will keep you quite busy ...
Spanish
Spanish is close to English with some 400 million speakers. Spanish is a language spoken by many people so you can feel proud to be one of the people who speaks it. You have many intercom options! In much of Spain and in Latin America as in Central America it is commonly spoken.
English
There are no less than 360 million native English speakers in the world, and there are also about 500 million people who speak it as a second language. English is the lingua franca of business, travel and international relations. The relative ease with which English can be learned (especially compared to Chinese) and the pervasive soft power of American culture means that English will continue to dominate the world stage for the foreseeable future. For some, English is still synonymous with opportunity and a better quality of life.
Hindi
India has 23 official languages, with the chief Hindi / Urdu among them. Whether it is one language, Hindustani, or two dialects, is still fiercely debated. Spoken mainly in northern India and parts of Pakistan, Hindi uses the devnagri script, while Urdu uses the Persian notation.
Arab
There are no less than 250 million native speakers of Arabic. Arabic, like Chinese, is different in their respective dialects. Modern Standard Arabic is a primarily written form, closely related to the classical Arabic of the Qur'an. However, the spoken forms of Arabic in, for example, Oman and Morocco are different from each other.
Top 10 languages by total number of speakers
Next we are going to take into account to make the list of the 10 most spoken languages in the world, regardless of whether or not it is only the mother tongue. In the previous list we have made the list of the 5 most spoken languages in the world, but without taking into account whether or not it is the second language. Next we are going to make the list of the 10 most spoken languages in the world, taking into account the total number of speakers.
- English: 1.121 million total speakers
- Chinos: 1.107 billion total speakers
- Turkey: 534 million speakers in total.
- Spanish: 512 million speakers in total.
- French: 284 million speakers in total.
- Arab: 273 million speakers in total.
- Russian: 265 million speakers in total.
- Bengali: 261 million speakers in total.
- Portuguese: 236 million speakers in total.
- Indonesian: 198 million speakers in total.
What language do you want to learn?