Home > List of languages by total speakers

- This page tries to present a list of languages by total native speakers. - - Note, however, that lists such as this may vary somewhat depending upon the definition given to certain terms. In particular, the exact difference between " dialect" and " language" is often important. An example of where this can have an impact is the case of Arabic, which can be considered either a single language or a group of related languages. Ethnologue and the CIA World Factbook, the sources of the tables given below, consider it to be multiple languages, and it is therefore not listed here. If one chose to count it as a single language, however, it would appear in the top ten. - - A similar situation occurs with Chinese. If all the varieties of Chinese are counted as a single language, then Chinese appears in first place with over 1.2 billion speakers. If counted separately, then five varieties of Chinese are found in the top 25. - - The lists only take into account first-language (native) speakers. Counting second language speakers is extremely difficult and approximate at best. -

1 Ethnologue estimates

- - The following data was collected in 1996, and should be considered out of date. We are attempting to find a more recent source. Linked pages may not agree with data here because of differing sources. Rankings were removed from some linked pages because of ambiguity and the age of these data. -

1. Mandarin (Chinese), 890 million
2. Spanish, 330 million
3. English, 320 million
4. Bengali, 190 million
5. Hindi, 180 million
6. Portuguese, 170 million
7. Russian, 170 million
8. Japanese, 125 million
9. GermanGerman (called Deutsch in German in which germanisch refers to prechristian times), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union. 120 million
10. Wu (Chinese)The Wu ( pinyin wu fng yan; pinyin wu y) spoken variations of the Chinese language are spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang; and the municipality of Shanghai. Wu includes Shanghainese, Suzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Yongkang and Shaoxing dialects. 77 million
11. JavaneseJavanese language is the spoken language of people in central and eastern part of island of Java, in Indonesia. According to Ethnologue, it is spoken by approximately 75,500,000 people. The Javanese language is part of the Malayo-Polynesian (or Austronesi 75 million
12. KoreanThe Korean language is the most widely used language in Korea, and is the official language of both South and North Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 78 million Korean speakers, including 75 million
13. FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to 72 million
14. VietnameseVietnamese (ting Vit, ting Vit-nam, or Vit-ngữ), a tonal language, is the national and official language of Vietnam (Vit-nam). It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (người Vit or người kinh), who constitute ab 68 million
15. TeluguTelugu belongs to the family of Dravidian languages and is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. It is also one among the 22 official national languages of India. In India, Telugu is the most spoken mother tongue after Hindi. 19th c 66 million
16. Cantonese (Chinese)This article is on all of the Yue dialects. For the dialect of Guangzhou and Hong Kong, see Standard Cantonese. Cantonese or Yu (colloquially known as /, lit. Guangdong speech" or more formally, yuey lit. Yue dialect", just as hany the formal term for Man 66 million
17. Marathi 65 million
18. Tamil 63 million
19. Turkish 59 million
20. Urdu 58 million
21. Min Nan (Chinese) 49 million
22. Jin (Chinese) 45 million
23. Gujarati 44 million
24. Polish 44 million
25. Egyptian Arabic 43 million
26. Ukrainian 41 million
27. Italian 37 million

Source: ethnologue