What Is the Most Popular Language in the World?

The most common language in the world is English, with the majority of speakers knowing English as their second language. How many people in the world speak English? In total, English has more than 1.13 billion speakers, with more than 379 million speaking it as their native language. English is a part of the Indo-European language tree, which also contains some of the other top languages in the world, like Spanish and French. English has split off into pidgin and creole languages itself as a result of colonialism, like the Jamaican Patois, Nigerian Pidgin, and Singlish. English also happens to be the top language used on websites by a vast majority of users (56.1%).

The Top 5 Languages in the World by Total Speakers

English: 1,132,366,680 total speakers Mandarin Chinese: 1,116,596,640 total speakers Hindi: 615,475,540 total speakers Spanish: 534,335,730 total speakers French: 279,821,930 total speakers

What Language Has the Most Native Speakers?

While English has the highest total number of speakers, Mandarin Chinese has the highest number of native speakers. How many people speak Mandarin? As a first language, roughly 918 million people speak Mandarin, with more than 1.11 billion total speakers worldwide. Mandarin Chinese includes a multitude of dialects, such as Standard Chinese, which is the official state language of the Chinese government, and the Beijing dialect. This may seem like a lot of people, but 30% of the country’s population does not speak Mandarin. Many other languages are also commonly used in the Sino-Tibetan world language tree. Map out the Sino-Tibetan language family tree and one can see the rich variety of Chinese languages. It might be upsetting to find out, however, that dozens of them are in danger of extinction.

The Top 5 Languages in the World by Native Speakers

Mandarin Chinese: 917,868,640 native speakers Spanish: 460,093,030 native speakers English: 379,007,140 native speakers Hindi: 341,208,640 native speakers Bengali: 228,289,600 native speakers

Use our chart to trace the lineage of your own language, or explore the full list of languages by number of speakers from Ethnologue.