The most spoken languages in the world (and why to learn them!)

There are just over 7000 official languages in the world, with many more languages and dialects without official status on top of that too. Yet despite this huge number, according to Ethnologue, just 23 major languages are spoken by over half the world's population. In this article, we'll be looking at some of the most spoken languages in the world languages and why they're worth learning. Let's get started!

Here's a list of the 10 most spoken languages in the world: 

English

When asked to guess the world’s most-spoken language, the majority of people would likely answer “English”, and they’d be right! As of 2022, English is thought to have some 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, with more non-native speakers of the language than native. In many ways, English can be considered the world’s lingua franca, allowing people of all different backgrounds and mother tongues to communicate.

However, English is not the same the world over! While you might be familiar with some of the differences between American and British English (think “color” versus “colour” or “faucet” versus “tap”), there are many countries who also have their own Standard English, with standard spellings, pronunciations and sentence structures. Indian English for example has a huge Hindi influence, with useful words such as “lakh” and “crore” to talk about big numbers (one lakh is one hundred thousand, while one crore is ten million). South African English meanwhile takes many terms from Afrikaans, such as “domkop” for idiot!

Fun fact: English is not actually the official language of the United States of America. In fact, the USA does not have an official language recognized at the federal level at all.

Chinese

There is no one language that is simply “Chinese”. Rather there is Mandarin, the official language of China, Cantonese, which is spoken primarily in Hong Kong, and many other dialects.

If there was any debate over the most-spoken language in the world, then it would have been between Mandarin Chinese and English. While English may have the most speakers in the world, Mandarin – closely following as the second most spoken language with 1.1 billion speakers – wins the trophy for the language with the most native speakers (around 918 million!).

Learning the second most spoken language, Mandarin is quite a linguistic departure for those who are only familiar with European languages. The tone system, whereby the rise or fall of pitch across a syllable changes the meaning of a word, can be tricky. “Ma” with a level tone means “mother”, but with a falling then rising tone, “horse”. However, for those familiar with languages like Spanish, with its different conjugations for different tenses, are saved a headache: Mandarin does not have tenses, preferring to use time words such as “yesterday” or “tomorrow” to indicate when something is happening and keeping the verb form the same.

Hindi

Hindi, with around 600 million speakers, takes 3rd place for the world’s most-spoken language. There is no national language in India. However, as of today, the Indian constitution recognizes 22 major languages as the official languages of India in what is known as “the 8th Schedule” of the Constitution. Competing with over 120 other Indian languages, Hindi language comes out on top as the one most widely-spoken across the nation, and is certainly the one to learn if you’re a lover of Bollywood.

Though the different script (Hindi is written in Devanagari) and complex grammar (Hindi has three different forms of address depending on different degrees of formality for example) may intimidate learners, speakers of major European languages like English, Spanish and German may be surprised to know that Hindi is actually very distantly related to them. Hindi, as well as most European languages, descended from an ancient language which linguists call “Indo-European”. Just look how the numbers one to ten in Hindi compare to these languages: Hindi “aaht” for “eight”, “saat” for “seven” (think Spanish “siete”) and“das” for “ten” (again like Spanish “diez”) bare the traces of these languages’ distant relations.

Spanish

Spanish has a huge base of native speakers, spanning Central and South America as well as Spain in Europe. For this reason, it is one of the most advantageous foreign languages to learn as it unlocks such a huge range of travel opportunities.

With just five vowels, getting your head around the spelling and pronunciation of Spanish is a lot easier than languages such as English, where an “ou” spelling can be pronounced in many different ways (“enough”, “though”, “through”, “bough” and so forth). Indeed, accordingly to the Foreign Service Institute rating, which assesses how hard a language is to learn for a native speaker of English based on the amount of time needed to reach a particular level of proficiency, Spanish falls into category 1, requiring just 600 hours of study to reach general proficiency. Comparing this with category V languages like Arabic or Korean, which require some 2200 hours to reach the same level of proficiency, Spanish certainly seems like the language to learn for those with busy calendars!

French

French is not just the official language of France. Other European countries, such as Belgium and Luxembourg, have also adopted it. Most importantly, many African countries also use it as an official language, among which are countries such as Benin, Chad, Mali and many more. Considering the important economical potential of this region of the world, learning French is definitely not a waste of time!

Due to the fast-growing number of its speakers, French now ranks as the 5th most spoken language in the world, just behind Spanish, with more than 280 million speakers.

Despite its resemblance to other Romance languages, French is not an easy language to learn, even for Europeans. The main difficulty in learning French lies in its complicated grammar (and its many exceptions to the rule!) and, most importantly, in its written form. In fact, the French language is full of words containing letters that are not pronounced. Take the following words for example: vert (green), vers (towards), ver (worm), verre (glass) are all pronounced the same! No wonder that spelling mistakes are a huge problem, even among native French speakers.

Arabic

Arabic is a notoriously hard language for English natives to learn, but with a huge number of speakers spanning North Africa to Asia and the Gulf, as well as the language of the Quran, this language is sure to be of interest for anyone interested in the Islamic world, or with a passion for a language-learning challenge!

There are upwards of 250 million Arabic speakers worldwide. However, how Arabic is spoken varies dramatically across its various homelands. Each country has its own dialect of Arabic, and a native Arabic speaker from Yemen may not be able to understand one from Morocco! This is where Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) comes in. Learners will most likely learn MSA, which functions as a lingua franca across the Arabic-speaking world and is understood by all natives, no matter where they are from.

Portuguese

Portuguese spans three continents as an official language. Portuguese speakers are spread across Portugal in Europe, Brazil in South America, and a number of African countries including Mozambique and Angola.

If you know Spanish, you have a significant step up when it comes to learning the romance language, Portuguese. Learners of Brazilian Portuguese may even find some things simpler than learning Spanish or indeed the standard Portuguese of Portugal. Brazilian Portuguese for example does not differentiate between formal and informal you, preferring to use “você” for both. For this reason, many Brazilians consider the Portuguese spoken in Portugal to be far more formal!

Japanese

The Japanese language benefits from an important exposure worldwide, especially in the cultural sector. Though, it is the eighth most spoken language in the world, but many people are familiar with some Japanese words or expressions, thanks to the huge popularity of mangas, animes and video games from Japan.

Japanese ranks as one of the most widely spoken languages with the largest number of native speakers (upwards of 125 million!) but is not used as an official language in any other country in the world outside of Japan.

If you plan on learning Japanese, be prepared to dedicate plenty of time to it, as it ranks in category V of the FSI language ranking system, this being the hardest category. The main difficulty that many Japanese learners are faced with is the fact that the language contains not one, but three alphabets! In order to master Japanese, you will thus need to remember the 48 hiragana, 46 katakana and 2,000 + kanji characters. On the bright side, Japanese grammar is quite easy, as there is no such thing as singular, plural, masculine or feminine. Also, as an English speaker, you start off with a bonus, as close to 10% or the words used in Japanese are actually English words!

Russian

Russian is the official language of Russia and of many former USSR countries. In fact, it can be considered as a lingua franca throughout the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Baltic states. In total, more than 258 million people speak it around the world, making it the 8th most spoken language worldwide. Interestingly, it is also one of the six official languages of the UN, and one of the two languages spoken aboard the International Space Station!

The Russian language east slavic language has its own alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 33 letters, 10 of which are vowels. Grammatically speaking, it is also pretty complicated to learn as you will need to master 6 cases in order to speak the language correctly, ranking it as such in the 4th category of the FSI language ranking system. 

German

The German-speaking world refers primarily to Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and is one of widely spoken languages in Europe, with around 130 million native speakers. Alongside English and French, German is one of three official procedural languages of the EU. It is also one of the major languages of Western philosophy: Kant, Hegel and Marx all wrote in German!

While German may be famous for its “untranslateable” words (“wanderlust” meaning a longing to go travelling and “schadenfreude”, delight in somebody else’s misfortune are two of the favourite examples), there is a lot more to German than just its compound words. Learners will have to contend with three grammatical genders and four grammatical cases, as well as some tricky sentence structures. But don’t be disheartened: English is itself a Germanic language, and learners will soon begin to see how similar many English words are to their German counterparts.

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