List of languages by number of native speakers

This is a list of languages by number of native speakers.

All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers 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. For example, a language is often defined as a set of mutually intelligible varieties, but independent national standard languages may be considered separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian. Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian, and English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible. While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. 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.

There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of 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 underreported in favour of a national language.

Top languages by population Ethnologue (2026) According to Ethnologue, the following languages have more than 50 million first-language speakers as of 2026.Statistics, in This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese. +Languages with at least 50 million first-language speakers Language Native speakers(millions) Language family Branch Mandarin Chinese 988 Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Spanish 487 Indo-European Romance English 372 Indo-European Germanic Hindi 347 Indo-European Indo-Aryan Portuguese 252 Indo-European Romance Bengali 232 Indo-European Indo-Aryan Russian 133 Indo-European Balto-Slavic Japanese 124 Japonic Western Punjabi 90 Indo-European Indo-Aryan Turkish 86 Turkic Oghuz Vietnamese 86 Austroasiatic Vietic Yue Chinese 85 Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Egyptian Arabic 83 Afroasiatic Semitic Wu Chinese 83 Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Marathi 83 Indo-European Indo-Aryan Telugu 83 Dravidian South-Central Korean 82 Koreanic Tamil 79 Dravidian South Urdu 78 Indo-European Indo-Aryan Indonesian 78 Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Standard German 76 Indo-European Germanic French 76 Indo-European Romance Javanese 69 Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Iranian Persian 65 Indo-European Iranian Italian 60 Indo-European Romance Hausa 58 Afroasiatic Chadic Gujarati 58 Indo-European Indo-Aryan Levantine Arabic 55 Afroasiatic Semitic Bhojpuri 53 Indo-European Indo-Aryan

CIA World Factbook (2018 estimates) According to the CIA World Factbook, the most-spoken first languages in 2018 were:

+ Top first languages by percentage per CIA Language Percentageof worldpopulation(2018) Mandarin Chinese 12.3% Spanish 6.0% English 5.1% Arabic 5.1% Hindi 3.5% Bengali 3.3% Portuguese 3.0% Russian 2.1% Japanese 1.7% Western Punjabi 1.3% Javanese 1.1%

List of languages by number of native speakers

Bron en licentie