With the advent of the world wide web and the expansion of mass travel, the percentage of people speaking more than one language has rocketed over the past few decades. If you are reading these words, there’s a chance one of your parents is a native English speaker, while another possibility is that you took several hours of lessons at school, you’ve watched Hollywood movies and TV series, or you might be an avid podcast listener. And that’s only the case of English.
In Europe, the Erasmus program has not only fostered the awareness of other cultures and languages, but it has —perhaps inadvertently— promoted the intermingling of different nations. Families with different cultural backgrounds are being formed, kids are being raised in mixed and diverse environments. Compared to thirty years ago, it is now far less uncommon for a kid to have parents from two different countries being raised in yet another one.
Knowing with precision what the most spoken languages in the world is not an easy task. By simple demographics, one could say that languages such as Mandarin and Hindi would be present on the list. But what about Urdu? Would you have guessed it’s also on the top 10?
Based on the numbers collected by Ethnologue, these are the top 10 most spoken languages according to the total number of people who speak them (whether or not the language is their mother tongue):
- English: 1,348 billion total speakers
- Mandarin Chinese: 1,120 billion total speakers
- Hindi: 600 million total speakers
- Spanish: 543 million total speakers
- Standard Arabic: 274 million total speakers
- Bengali: 268 million total speakers
- French: 267 million total speakers
- Russian: 258 million total speakers
- Portuguese: 258 million total speakers
- Urdu: 230 million total speakers
Top 10 Languages by number of native speakers
- Chinese: 1.3 billion Native Speakers
- Spanish: 471 million Native Speakers
- English: 370 million Native Speakers
- Hindi: 342 million Native Speakers
- Arabic: 315 million Native Speakers
- Portuguese: 232 million Native Speakers
- Bengali: 229 million Native Speakers
- Russian: 154 million Native Speakers
- Japanese: 126 million Native Speakers
- Lahnda (Western Punjabi): 118 million Native Speakers
