Editor's note: Due to a software issue, a previous version of this graphic displayed incorrect spelling of Arabic and Urdu. This has since been corrected!
The top 12 languages globally, as of 2023. These figures come from Ethnologue, which publishes a list of the largest languages every year.
See the top 20 languages in the data tab.
Language | Number of Speakers | |
---|---|---|
1 | English | 1,500,000,000 |
2 | Mandarin | 1,100,000,000 |
3 | Hindi | 609,500,000 |
4 | Spanish | 559,100,000 |
5 | French | 309,800,000 |
6 | Standard Arabic | 274,000,000 |
7 | Bengali | 272,800,000 |
8 | Portuguese | 263,600,000 |
9 | Russian | 255,000,000 |
10 | Urdu | 231,700,000 |
11 | Indonesian | 199,100,000 |
12 | German | 133,200,000 |
13 | Japanese | 123,400,000 |
14 | Nigerian Pidgin | 120,700,000 |
15 | Egyptian Spoken Arabic | 102,400,000 |
16 | Marathi | 99,200,000 |
17 | Telugu | 96,000,000 |
18 | Turkish | 90,000,000 |
19 | Tamil | 86,600,000 |
20 | Yue Chinese | 86,600,000 |
See the second link for Ethnologue's in-depth methodology page.
https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/https://www.ethnologue.com/methodology/