Did you know that there are nearly 7,000 different languages spoken around the world? It’s a staggering number, and it’s hard to imagine that so many different tongues exist. But, as populations grow and people move around the globe more and more, the number of languages being spoken continues to increase. In this blog post, we will take a look at the 10 most spoken languages in the world. Keep reading to learn more.
Do you want to rank languages by their total number of speakers, or by how many people speak them natively? How do you distinguish a language from a dialect when speaking?
This is the most up to date estimate at this time, as to the most-spoken languages in the world.
1. Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion speakers)
There are 897 million native speakers. Mandarin Chinese is the official language in China, Taiwan, and Singapore.
Mandarin Chinese is not only the most spoken language in the world, but also has the largest number of native speakers. The majority of Mandarin Chinese speakers live in China, where it is the official language. However, there are also sizable populations of Mandarin Chinese speakers in Taiwan and Singapore.
193 million non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese also exist in the world, which make a total of 1.09 billion speakers worldwide.
Mandarin Chinese is the official language of the People’s Republic of China.
Putonghua, or Mandarin, is the Chinese name for the language, which literally translates as “common speech.” It was also known as Guanhua before – “the language of government officials.”
Mandarin Chinese is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese. It is a tonal language, with four tones in Mandarin (five in some dialects).
The written form of Mandarin Chinese uses traditional Chinese characters. Simplified Chinese characters were introduced by the Mainland China government in the 1950s to promote literacy.
Chinese characters are sometimes known as “Han characters”, an ancient pictorial language in which each sign represents a distinct word, you must learn 2,000-3,000 symbols. To understand a newspaper, you’d need to know 2,000-3,000 words.
The grammar of Mandarin Chinese is relatively simple compared to other languages. There are no tenses, verb conjugations, or articles (a, an, the).
Vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese is largely based on meaning and not on grammatical function. This can make it difficult for speakers of other languages to learn.
2. English (983 million speakers)
There are 371 million native speakers. English is the official language in 54 countries.
English has more native speakers than any other language, with 371 million people around the world speaking it as their first language. It is also the official language of 54 different countries. This widespread use of English has made it the lingua franca of our time, meaning that it is used as a
Number of non-native speakers: 611 million. Total number of speakers: 983 million.
English is the second most spoken language in the world.
The name “English”. comes from the “Angles”, a Germanic people who settled in Britain in the first millennium A.D. They ultimately derived their name from Anglen, a region in northern Germany.
English is a Germanic language, but has been heavily influenced by other languages. Much of its vocabulary is Latin in origin, having been introduced by Normans.
