1. Number Languages In The World
2. Most Talked Languages In The World 2019 Movie
3. Most Spoken Languages In The World 2018

This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers.

Number Languages In The World

Top 10 Most Spoken Languages in the world (and 10 of the Least Spoken) Let’s play a game. Try to name off the top 10 most spoken languages in the world. Ready, set, go! If you are like me, your list probably went “English, French, Spanish, ummm German, Chinese, and maybe Italian?” your confidence waning with each subsequent language.

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 varieties that are 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 German, Italian and even English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible.^[1]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 due to shared culture and a single written form.It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties.^[4]

There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time due to 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.^[5]

• 1Top languages by population

Top languages by population

Ethnologue (2019, 22nd edition)

The following 90 languages are listed as having at least 10 million first language speakers in the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, which is based in the United States.^[6]

Nationalencyklopedin (2010)

The following table contains the top 100 languages by estimated number of native speakers in the 2007 edition of the Swedish encyclopedia Nationalencyklopedin. As census methods in different countries vary to a considerable extent, and given that some countries do not record language in their censuses, any list of languages by native speakers, or total speakers, is effectively based on estimates. Updated estimates from 2010 are also provided.^[8]

The top eleven languages have additional figures from the 2010 edition of the Nationalencyklopedin. Numbers above 95 million are rounded off to the nearest 5 million.

Charts and graphs

• Bubble chart of languages by proportion of native speakers worldwide^[8]

• Languages with at least 50 million first-language speakers, millions (according to: Ethnologue^[10])

See also

• List of languages by number of native speakers in India (uses a different definition of Hindi)

Notes

1. ^Ethnologue counts some dependent territories as countries in its tallies.
2. ^Refers to only Modern Standard Hindi here. The Census of India defines Hindi on a loose and broad basis. It does not include the entire Hindustani language, only the Hindi register of it. In addition to Standard Hindi, it incorporates a set of other Indo-Aryan languages written in Devanagari script including Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Dhundhari etc. under Hindi group which have more than 422 million native speakers as of 2001.^[9] However, the census also acknowledges Standard Hindi, the above mentioned languages and others as separate mother tongues of the Hindi language and provides individual figures for all these languages.^[9]
3. ^ ^abcdefghThis is only a fraction of total speakers; others are counted under 'Hindi' as they regard their language a Hindi dialect.
4. ^Numbers may also be counted in Punjabi above
5. ^Only half this many use Belarusian as their home language.

References

1. ^ ^abPaolillo, 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. ^Chambers, J.K.; Trudgill, Peter (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-59646-6.
3. ^Kaye, Alan S.; Rosenhouse, Judith (1997). 'Arabic Dialects and Maltese'. In Hetzron, Robert (ed.). The Semitic Languages. Routledge. pp. 263–311. ISBN978-0-415-05767-7.
4. ^Norman, Jerry (2003). 'The Chinese dialects: phonology'. In Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.). The Sino-Tibetan languages. Routledge. pp. 72–83. ISBN978-0-7007-1129-1.
5. ^Crystal, David (1988). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 286–287. ISBN978-0-521-26438-9.
6. ^ ^ab'Summary by language size'. Ethnologue. Retrieved 12 March 2019. For items below #26, see individual Ethnologue entry for each language.
7. ^'World Population Clock: 7.7 Billion People (2019) - Worldometers'. www.worldometers.info. Retrieved 31 March 2019.
8. ^ ^abMikael Parkvall, 'Världens 100 största språk 2007' (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin. Asterisks mark the 2010 estimates for the top dozen languages.
9. ^ ^abAbstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues – 2000, Census of India, 2001
10. ^Summary by language size

External links

• The Ethnologue's most recent list of languages by number of speakers
• Languages Spoken by More Than 10 Million People (Archived 2009-10-31) – Encarta list, based on data from Ethnologue, but some figures (e.g. for Arabic) widely vary from it

This is a list of languages by the total number of speakers.

Background[edit]

Lists such as these should be used with caution, for the following reasons:

• First, it is difficult to define exactly what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, some languages, including Chinese and Arabic, cover several mutually unintelligiblevarieties and are sometimes considered single languages and sometimes language families. Conversely, colloquialregisters of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible, so they are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani, instead of two separate languages.^[1]
• Second, there is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. For example, English has about 400 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers.^[2]

Most Talked Languages In The World 2019 Movie

Ethnologue (2019, 22nd edition)[edit]

The following 32 languages are listed as having 50 million or more total speakers in the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, which is based in the United States.^[3] Entries identified by Ethnologue as macrolanguages are not included in this section.

Most Spoken Languages In The World 2018

Wikipedia also lists other languages as having 50 million or more total speakers. For example, the Wikipedia page for the Tagalog language reports 70+ million speakers by as early as 2000 and 73+ million speakers by 2013: 28 million L1 (first language) speakers as of 2007 and 45 million L2 (second language) speakers as of 2013. However, Tagalog is not included in this section because Ethnologue reports it as having only 23+ million total speakers.^[4]

Speaker totals are generally not reliable because they sum estimates from different dates and sources, usually uncited. Language information is not collected by most national censuses.

See also[edit]

• List of languages without official status by total number of speakers

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^For further examples of mutually intelligible varieties that are often, and even legally, classified as separate languages, see Malay language, Persian language and Serbo-Croatian.
2. ^Crystal, David (March 2008). 'Two thousand million?'. English Today. doi:10.1017/S0266078408000023.
3. ^'Summary by language size'. Ethnologue. Retrieved 2019-03-01.
4. ^Tagalog at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
5. ^English at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
6. ^Chinese, Mandarin at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
7. ^Hindi at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
8. ^Spanish at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
9. ^French at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
10. ^Arabic, Standard at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
11. ^Bengali at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
12. ^Russian at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
13. ^Portuguese at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
14. ^Indonesian at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
15. ^Urdu at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
16. ^German, Standard at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
17. ^Japanese at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
18. ^Swahili at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
19. ^Marathi at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
20. ^Telugu at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
21. ^Punjabi, Western at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
22. ^Chinese, Wu at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
23. ^Tamil at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
24. ^Turkish at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
25. ^Korean at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
26. ^Vietnamese at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
27. ^Chinese, Yue at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
28. ^Javanese at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
29. ^Italian at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
30. ^Arabic, Egyptian at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
31. ^Hausa at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
32. ^Thai at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
33. ^Gujarati at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
34. ^Kannada at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
35. ^Persian, Iranian at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
36. ^Bhojpuri at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)
37. ^Chinese, Min Nan at Ethnologue (22nd ed., 2019)

External links[edit]

• ‹See Tfd›(in French)Qu'est-ce que la Francophonie?