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Most Widely Spoken Languages
in the World

Mandarin Chinese tops the list of most popular world languages, with over a billion speakers. English trails in second place, with just over 500 million speakers. This data includes all speakers of the languages, not only native speakers.

Language	Approx. number of speakers
1. Chinese (Mandarin)	1,075,000,000
2. English	514,000,000
3. Hindustani¹	496,000,000
4. Spanish	425,000,000
5. Russian	275,000,000
6. Arabic	256,000,000
7. Bengali	215,000,000
8. Portuguese	194,000,000
9. Malay-Indonesian	176,000,000
10. French	129,000,000

Source: Ethnologue, 13th Edition, and other sources.

1. Encompasses multiple dialects, including Hindi and Urdu.

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Most Widely Spoken Languagesin the World

Most Widely Spoken Languages
in the World