Mandarin Chinese tops the list of most popular world languages, with over a billion speakers. English trails in third place, with just over 320 million speakers. This data includes all speakers of the languages, not only native speakers.
| Language | Approx. number of speakers |
|---|---|
| 1. Chinese (Mandarin) | 1,213,000,000 |
| 2. Spanish | 329,000,000 |
| 3. English | 328,000,000 |
| 4. Arabic | 221,000,000 |
| 5. Hindi1 | 182,000,000 |
| 6. Bengali | 181,000,000 |
| 7. Portuguese | 178,000,000 |
| 8. Russian | 144,000,000 |
| 9. Japanese | 122,000,000 |
| 10. German | 90,000,000 |
Source: Ethnologue, 16th Edition.
1. Encompasses multiple dialects.
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