Skip to Content

Top 10 Most Spoken Languages In The World

Ah go on, give it a share!

We were previously curious about the top 10 passports in the world along with the most visited countries but what about the top 10 most spoken languages in the world?

Some are obvious, like English, Spanish and Mandarin but what about the rest of the languages?

Around the world, there is a total of 7,102 known languages, of this vast amount ten remain popular enough to be considered the most spoken languages of the world.

most spoken languages in the world 2018

So let’s begin:

10th Most spoken language in the world:

Punjabi – Fifteen years ago, German held the tenth spot, though Punjabi has recently surpassed it. With 102 million speakers, Punjabi is mainly spoken in India and Pakistan and is a native language of 1.44 percent of the world’s population.

9th Most spoken language in the world: 

Japanese: Out of the approximately 125 million people who speak Japanese, 124 million live in Japan and the island group of Okinawa.

8th Most spoken language in the world: 

Russian: Russian’s 155 million speakers make it the world’s eighth most common language. On another note, it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations

7th Most spoken language in the world:

Bengali: With 205 million speakers, Bengali is also the second most widely spoken language in India, popular in the easternmost states. Bengali is an official language of both India and Bangladesh.

6th Most spoken language in the world: 

Portuguese: Out of the 215 million Portuguese speakers worldwide, nearly 150 million of them speak Brazilian Portuguese, the most common language variant.

Portuguese is also the official language of other countries including Angola, Mozambique, and — clearly — Portugal, among others.

5th Most spoken language in the world:

Arabic: No surprise here, it is spoken by approx 295 million worldwide. Interestingly enough Spanish has approx 4000 words with Arabic roots(sources below)

4th Most spoken language in the world: 

Hindi/Urdu – Over 310 million people, speak one of the two.

3rd Most spoken language in the world:

English – The good ole English language used to be the second most spoken language in the world.

But in the past 15 years, Spanish speakers have increased so much it has overtaken it.

Some experts argue that English is the most dominant language on account of how many countries it is spoken in. Over 360 million people who speak it.

2nd Most spoken language in the world: 

Spanish: With a massive 405 million speakers, Spanish just surpasses English.

The most spoken language in the world: 

Mandarin – Okay, a lot of you would have guessed this, but did you know that it has over 955 million speakers worldwide!

Approximately 14.4 percent of the world’s population are native speakers of Mandarin.

Sources of the most spoken languages in the world:

Estimating these most common language populations can be hard, and there is a range of data available.

First, it ‘s hard to define exactly what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect.

For example, Chinese is sometimes considered a single language and sometimes as a language family.

Second, there is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker.

English has about 350 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers.

So the above criteria are based on a language reference published by SIL International,

Feel free to share this list of the most spoken languages in the world with your friends.

Ah go on, give it a share!