The most spoken languages in the world

The most spoken languages in the world are English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Spanish if you count everyone who speaks them, and Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English and Hindi if you count only native speakers. English is first on one list and third on the other, because about three in every four people who speak it learned it as a second language. Below are both rankings, with Ethnologue's 2026 figures, and the reasons they differ.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 5 min read

The most spoken languages by total speakers

This list counts everyone who speaks the language, as a first language or a later one.

The figures are Ethnologue's for 2026. The two columns do not always add up exactly to the total, because each is rounded separately.

The most spoken languages by native speakers

This list counts only people who grew up speaking the language.

Below eighth place the list cannot honestly be ranked. Eight languages sit between 82 and 86 million native speakers: Vietnamese and Turkish (86 million each), Yue Chinese, which includes Cantonese (85), Egyptian Arabic, Marathi, Telugu and Wu Chinese, which includes Shanghainese (83 each), and Korean (82). Western Punjabi, with 90 million speakers in all, is given no separate native figure. The differences between these languages are smaller than the uncertainty in any of the counts.

Why the two lists differ

Some languages are mostly learned, not inherited. English has 372 million native speakers and 1,121 million who learned it later: three in four of its speakers. French is the same shape, with 75 million native speakers and 258 million others. Indonesian and Urdu are national languages with far more second-language speakers than native ones. Swahili is the extreme case, with 4 million native speakers and 91 million second-language speakers.

Some languages are almost entirely inherited. Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali and Japanese are big because many people are born into them. Japanese has 124 million native speakers and about 2 million others. That is why Portuguese is fifth by native speakers and eighth by total, and why Japanese is on the native list and nowhere near the top of the other.

Modern Standard Arabic has no native speakers at all. It is the written and formal language of the Arab world, learned at school; what people speak at home is a regional variety, such as Egyptian Arabic, which the list counts separately. So Arabic is fifth by total speakers and does not appear on the native list as a single language.

It depends what you count

Three decisions move languages up and down these lists, and none of them has a single right answer.

What counts as one language. Ethnologue's list "ranks individual languages, not macrolanguages". If Chinese were counted as one language, Mandarin's 988 million native speakers would be joined by Yue's 85 million, Wu's 83 million and more. Arabic is treated the same way: its regional varieties are listed one by one, and Egyptian Arabic alone has 83 million native speakers. Hindi and Urdu are counted separately, though their speakers understand each other in everyday conversation; together they would pass 850 million total speakers. Where the lines fall is the subject of how many languages are there in the world, and the Chinese case is set out in how many people speak Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese.

Who counts as a speaker. A native speaker is easy to define. A second-language speaker is not: the figure depends on how well someone has to speak a language to be counted, and different surveys draw that line in different places. The second-language column is the softer of the two.

Which year you ask. The figures move with every edition. Ethnologue's own chart for 2025 put English at 1,528 million total speakers; its 2026 list has 1,493 million. Nothing happened to English in that year. The estimates were revised.

How concentrated the world's speakers are

Ethnologue says of its list of the 200 largest languages that "over 88% of people use one of these languages as their native tongue". There are about 7,000 languages in the world, so the other 6,970 or so share the remaining 12% of humanity between them. By the same source, the 20 largest languages alone are the native language of more than 3.7 billion people.

If you are choosing a language to learn

Size is one reason to pick a language, and a weak one on its own: what matters is who you want to talk to. Still, five of the twelve most spoken languages are ones an English speaker can start today on Verbavia (our own course), free on the web:

• Mandarin, first by native speakers and second by total.
• Spanish, second by native speakers and fourth by total.
• French, sixth by total speakers, most of them second-language.
• Portuguese, fifth by native speakers.
• German, twelfth by total speakers.

Verbavia also teaches Italian, which Ethnologue puts at 66 million speakers, and Shanghainese, the best-known variety of Wu Chinese, a language with as many native speakers as Korean or Telugu and almost no learning material in English. How long each takes an English speaker is compared in the easiest languages to learn and the hardest languages to learn.

Which language is the oldest, and why the question has no answer for speech, is in what is the oldest language in the world.

How many of them one person can speak, and why the record claims are so hard to check, is in how many languages can one person speak.

Sources

• Ethnologue (2026): What are the top 200 most spoken languages?, for the statement that the list ranks individual languages and not macrolanguages, and that over 88% of people have one of the 200 as their native tongue. The full list is sold by Ethnologue; the figures for each language above are from that list as tabulated in Wikipedia's List of languages by total number of speakers, which cites it.
• Ethnologue: What is the most spoken language?, for the order of the top four on each list and the 2025 chart figures.
• Ethnologue: How many languages are there in the world?, for the 20 largest languages and 3.7 billion people.