How much languages are in the world

It is the default language in international business, tourism, technology, etc. A bilingual person, speaking Spanish and English, is able to understand 1 from 3 people who connect to the Internet Internet World Stats, When native and non-native speakers are added together, Mandarin is the second most spoken language in the world.

However, it is the first if only native speakers are taken into account. Mandarin is not really a language, but a set of dialects of the Chinese language. The fact that unifies these dialects under one name is that their speakers can understand each other. Hindi is, along with English, one of the 22 official languages of India, the second-most-populous country in the world.

The linguistic diversity of the region more than 1, languages coexist explains the high rate of non-native speakers who use it as a lingua franca. It is the second most spoken language in the world in terms of the number of native speakers. It is also the third most used on the Internet. Its enormous colonial expansion took it not only to America but also to Africa and Asia. Due to migration, the United States is the country with the second-largest number of Spanish speakers in the world.

Colonialism allowed the French to spread throughout the world. Today it is the official language of 29 countries on different continents. If English is the language of business, French was considered the language of culture. Determining what are the most spoken languages in the world is a more difficult task than you might imagine. We can say with some confidence that Mandarin, English, Spanish and Arabic will make an appearance and roughly in what order , but there are some surprises, too!

Would you have guessed that Bengali is in the top 10 most spoken languages? What constitutes a language or a dialect is hotly contested stuff. The numbers below are taken compiled by Ethnologue , which is widely considered the most complete language data source currently in existence. When tallied according to number of native speakers only, these are the most spoken languages in the world.

Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1. If you wish to learn a language that one in six people in the world speak, this is the one for you. Seeing as Chinese is a tonal language that uses thousands of logograms, it will certainly keep you busy. If we were only to look at native speakers, Spanish has its nose in front of English with about million speakers.

If you want a language that will open up whole continents to you, Spanish is your best bet. As with all the languages on this list, the politics of language and associated identity are highly disputed: ask Catalan or Quechua speakers if Spanish is their local tongue and you will get a very different answer. But it is certainly the primary language of most of South and Central America, Spain, and, ahem , large swathes of the US. Learn this language if… you love languages without genders that use simple verb conjugations and have a lot of resources to choose from.

Did you know? English is still the most-spoken language as well as the most common in the world, not due to its native speakers alone, but because many others learn it as a second language. It is well worth the effort as our lingua franca and a crucial tool for business between cultures! The second most spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. That makes it the largest of all Chinese dialects by far.

It is also a great reason to learn more about this year old giant! Many fear learning Mandarin due to its 50, different characters — which, in comparison to the letter alphabet, are quite intimidating — but 2, characters would be enough for everyday Mandarin to be understood. Fun fact: Arabic has at least 11 words for love, each of them expressing a different stage in the process of falling in love. With million native speakers, Arabic is the sixth most spoken language in the world, and the only one in our top twelve that is written from right to left.

It has also heavily influenced European languages like Spanish and Portuguese: some words sound exactly the same. The word coffee, for example, comes from the Arabic word qahwa. Language family: Indo-Aryan, a sub-family of Indo-European. Bengali, known to many English speakers around the world as Bangla, is mostly spoken in Bangladesh and India and is considered by some to be the second most beautiful language after French.

Every consonant has a vowel sound built in, which is quite unusual for Westerners. It gets even better: different marks change the default vowel sound of a word and therefore also the meaning! Language family: East Slavic, a sub-family of Indo-European. One of the most spread out languages with around million native speakers living across the world , the eighth most spoken language in the world is Russian.

While Russian grammar is renowned to be a little tricky, Russian only has about , words English has roughly one million , which is why most of them have more than one meaning. Language family: Romance, a sub-branch of Indo-European. In , a new agreement was signed to standardise spelling forms across different variations. Portuguese is rooted in the region of Medieval Galicia which was partly in the north of Portugal and partly in the northwest of Spain , but only five percent of the million native Portuguese speakers actually live in Portugal.

Related to: Malay, Javanese, Sundranese, Madurese etc.