This is a list of languages by total speakers.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Chinese, Mandarin Hindi English Spanish Bengali Russian Portuguese Japanese German, Standard Korean French

14.37% 6.02% 5.61% 5.59% 3.4% 2.75% 2.63% 2.06% 1.64% 1.28% 1.27%

(2000 estimate)¹

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The following data was collected in 1996, and should be considered out of date. We are attempting to find a more recent source. Linked pages may not agree with data here because of differing sources. Rankings were removed from some linked pages because of ambiguity and the age of this data.

Lists such as this may vary somewhat depending upon the definition given to certain terms. In particular, the exact difference between "dialect" and "language" is often important. An example of where this can have an impact is the case of Arabic, which can be considered either a single language or a group of related languages. Ethnologue, the source of this table, considers it to be multiple languages, and it is therefore not listed here. If one chose to count it as a single language, however, it would appear in the top ten.

A similar situation occurs with Chinese. If all the varieties of Chinese are counted as a single language, then Chinese appears in first place with over 1.2 billion speakers. If counted separately, then five varieties of Chinese are found in the top 25.

This list only takes into account first-language (native) speakers. Counting second language speakers is extremely difficult and approximate at best.

1. Mandarin (Chinese), 890 million
2. Spanish, 330 million
3. English, 320 million
4. Bengali, 190 million
5. Hindi, 180 million
6. Portuguese, 170 million
7. Russian, 170 million
8. Japanese, 125 million
9. German 120 million
10. Wu (Chinese) 77 million
11. Javanese 75 million
12. Korean 75 million
13. French 72 million
14. Vietnamese 68 million
15. Telugu 66 million
16. Cantonese (Chinese) 66 million
17. Marathi 65 million
18. Tamil 63 million
19. Turkish 59 million
20. Urdu 58 million
21. Italian 57 million
22. Min Nan (Chinese) 49 million
23. Jin (Chinese) 45 million
24. Gujarati 44 million
25. Polish 44 million
26. Egyptian Arabic 43 million
27. Ukrainian 41 million

Source: ethnologue

See also

• List of languages

Insert non-formatted text here--217.43.181.148 16:36, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC) 1.anus

External links

• ¹CIA - The World Factbook -- World
• 100 most widely spoken languages
• top 100 languages
• ethnologue
• List of languages by total speakers including non-native speakers