This is a list of languages by total number of speakers.
It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligiblevarieties, and so they are sometimes considered language families instead. Conversely, colloquialregisters of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible, and are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani. Such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum.[1]
There is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers.[2]
There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be underreported in favor of a national language.[3]
Ethnologue (2023)
The following languages are listed as having 45 million or more total speakers in the 26th edition of Ethnologue published in 2023.[4] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese.
Until 2050 global population change will also change the number of speakers of languages. Some studies have projected with rapid population growth in particularly West Africa, that French would be known by more people than English.[47] Other projections have French not ranked as high,[48] but see French, with Arabic, rise among the top six languages by number of speakers, the projected languages with above 500 million speakers, and already today the top six languages:
English, Mandarin, Hindi-Urdu, French, Arabic and Spanish being projected to fall behind, followed by Portugues, similarly like French and Arabic with significant additional growth in Africa, overtaking Bengali.[49]
^Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is not an L1. Arabic speakers first learn their respective local dialect. MSA is acquired through formal education.[10]
^Tagalog and Filipino are defined as two different languages in the ISO 639 standard. Ethnologue considers that Filipino is a standardized variety of the Tagalog language with no speakers.
References
^Paolillo, John C.; Das, Anupam (31 March 2006). "Evaluating language statistics: the Ethnologue and beyond" (PDF). UNESCO Institute of Statistics. pp. 3–5. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
^Crystal, David (March 2008). "Two thousand million?". English Today. 24: 3–6. doi:10.1017/S0266078408000023. S2CID 145597019.
^Crystal, David (1988). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 286–287. ISBN 978-0-521-26438-9.
^ a b"What are the top 200 most spoken languages?". Ethnologue. 2023. Retrieved 2023-08-25.
