List of languages by number of native speakers

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For languages by total speakers, see List of languages by total number of speakers. For languages with the smallest numbers of native speakers, see lists of endangered languages.

Current distribution of human language families

This article ranks human languages by their number of

native speakers
.

However, all such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum.[1] For example, a language is often defined as a set of

mutually intelligible, but independent national standard languages may be considered to be separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian.[2]
Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including
better source needed
] While
Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors describe its mutually unintelligible varieties as separate languages.[3]
Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language.[4] It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Cantonese, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties.[5]

There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be under-reported in favour of a national language.[6]

Top languages by population

Ethnologue (2023, 26th edition)

The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 2023 edition of Ethnologue.[7]

Languages with at least 50 million first-language speakers[7]
Language Native speakers
(millions) 		Language family Branch
Mandarin Chinese
(incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties
) 		939 Sino-Tibetan Sinitic
Spanish
 485 Indo-European Romance
English
 380 Indo-European Germanic
Hindi
(excl. Urdu, and other languages
) 		345 Indo-European Indo-Aryan
Portuguese
 236 Indo-European Romance
Bengali
 234 Indo-European Indo-Aryan
Russian
 147 Indo-European Balto-Slavic
Japanese
 123 Japonic Japanese
Cantonese
 86.1 Sino-Tibetan Sinitic
Vietnamese
 85.0 Austroasiatic Vietic
Turkish
 84.0 Turkic Oghuz
Wu Chinese
(incl. Shanghainese
) 		83.4 Sino-Tibetan Sinitic
Marathi
 83.2 Indo-European Indo-Aryan
Telugu
 83.0 Dravidian South-Central
Korean
 81.7 Koreanic —
French
 80.8 Indo-European Romance
Tamil
 78.6 Dravidian South
Egyptian Spoken Arabic
(excl. Saʽidi Arabic
) 		77.4 Afroasiatic Semitic
Standard German
 75.3 Indo-European Germanic
Urdu
(excl. Hindi
) 		70.6 Indo-European Indo-Aryan
Javanese
 68.3 Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian
Eastern Punjabi
) 		66.7 Indo-European Indo-Aryan
Italian
 64.6 Indo-European Romance
Gujarati
 57.1 Indo-European Indo-Aryan
Iranian Persian
(excl. Dari and Tajik
) 		57.2 Indo-European Iranian
Bhojpuri
 52.3 Indo-European Indo-Aryan
Hausa
 51.7 Afroasiatic Chadic

CIA (2018 estimates)

According to the CIA, the most-spoken first languages in 2018 were:[8]

Top first languages by population per CIA[8]
Rank Language Percentage
of world
population
(2018)
1 Mandarin Chinese 12.3%
2 Spanish 6.0%
3 English 5.1%
3
Arabic
 5.1%
5
Hindi
 3.5%
6 Bengali 3.3%
7 Portuguese 3.0%
8 Russian 2.1%
9 Japanese 1.7%
10 Western Punjabi 1.3%
11 Javanese 1.1%

See also

Notes

References

  1. ^ a b Paolillo, John C.; Das, Anupam (31 March 2006). "Evaluating language statistics: the Ethnologue and beyond" (PDF). UNESCO Institute of Statistics. pp. 3–5. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
  2. ISBN 978-0-521-59646-6
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-415-05767-7
    .
  4. ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3
    .
  5. ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1
    .
  6. ISBN 978-0-521-26438-9
    .
  7. ^ a b Statistics, in Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2023). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (26th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
  8. ^ a b "Most spoken languages in the World". Retrieved 1 January 2022.

External links

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