Hello! Nĭ hăo! Namaste! Hola! Bonjour! There are so many ways we as human beings can express ourselves, as one can see in our list of most-spoken languages. Around the world, there are more than 7,000 regularly spoken vernaculars, but we decided to show off the top 100 most common languages in our linguistic infographic. World languages list varied origins, with some branching off from the same ancient roots and some having a history all their own. We’ve illustrated each one with its language origin tree, so you can trace their roots. Beautiful and ever-evolving, like a forest, the sheer variety of common languages spoken around the globe has been charted here in one world language map. Check out the top 100 most popular languages and their origins.
What Is the Most Popular Language in the World?
The most common language in the world is English, with the majority of speakers knowing English as their second language. How many people in the world speak English? In total, English has more than 1.13 billion speakers, with more than 379 million speaking it as their native language. English is a part of the Indo-European language tree, which also contains some of the other top languages in the world, like Spanish and French. English has split off into pidgin and creole languages itself as a result of colonialism, like the Jamaican Patois, Nigerian Pidgin, and Singlish. English also happens to be the top language used on websites by a vast majority of users (56.1%).
The Top 5 Languages in the World by Total Speakers
- English: 1,132,366,680 total speakers
- Mandarin Chinese: 1,116,596,640 total speakers
- Hindi: 615,475,540 total speakers
- Spanish: 534,335,730 total speakers
- French: 279,821,930 total speakers
What Language Has the Most Native Speakers?
While English has the highest total number of speakers, Mandarin Chinese has the highest number of native speakers. How many people speak Mandarin? As a first language, roughly 918 million people speak Mandarin, with more than 1.11 billion total speakers worldwide. Mandarin Chinese includes a multitude of dialects, such as Standard Chinese, which is the official state language of the Chinese government, and the Beijing dialect. This may seem like a lot of people, but 30% of the country’s population does not speak Mandarin. Many other languages are also commonly used in the Sino-Tibetan world language tree. Map out the Sino-Tibetan language family tree and one can see the rich variety of Chinese languages. It might be upsetting to find out, however, that dozens of them are in danger of extinction.
The Top 5 Languages in the World by Native Speakers
- Mandarin Chinese: 917,868,640 native speakers
- Spanish: 460,093,030 native speakers
- English: 379,007,140 native speakers
- Hindi: 341,208,640 native speakers
- Bengali: 228,289,600 native speakers
Use our chart to trace the lineage of your own language, or explore the full list of languages by number of speakers from Ethnologue.
