The 10 most-spoken languages in the world

When tallied according to number of native speakers only, these are the most spoken languages in the world.

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Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 900 million of whom speak Mandarin.

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Spanish

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English

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Arabic, like Chinese, is so vastly different in its respective dialects as to be effectively a number of languages, grouped as one for the sake of convenience.

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The 10 most-spoken languages in the world

When tallied according to number of native speakers only, these are the most spoken languages in the world.

Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 900 million of whom speak Mandarin.

Chinese

Spanish

If we were only to look at native speakers, Spanish is in front of English with about 485 million speakers.

English

If you’re reading this, you may be one of the 370 million-odd native English speakers, or one of the billion people who speak it as a second language.

Arabic, like Chinese, is so vastly different in its respective dialects as to be effectively a number of languages, grouped as one for the sake of convenience.

Arabic

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