What is the world’s most
spoken language? The answer depends on how you choose to measure. Some
statistics are harder to measure than others; all should be taken with a pinch
of salt. For example, estimates for how many people speak a language as a second
language are often put forward by people with some political or financial
interest in making a certain language appear more or less important. This can
skew their estimates.
Even organisations that set
out to present information as neutrally as possible are dependent on censuses
and surveys for their information. For example, the EU’s Eurobarometer reports rely on asking people in which languages
apart from their mother tongue they can hold a conversation. Self-assessment is
notoriously tricky and people will hold themselves to different standards.
So, with that in mind, here
are some statistics:
Most
widely spoken language by number of native speakers
- Mandarin (845 million)
- Spanish (329 million)
- English (328 million)
- Hindi-Urdu (240 million)
- Arabic (232 million)
- Bengali (181 million)
- Portuguese (178 million)
- Russian (144 million)
- Japanese (122 million)
- Punjabi (109 million)
This information, based on number of native speakers, comes from Ethnologue, a widely-respected encyclopaedia of the world’s living languages. At
the time of the last update, there were 6909 living languages, but that figure
is likely to have decreased since then as languages become extinct.
When looking at the numbers, it is important to remember that the exact
figures are difficult to measure. For example, when the US government asks
about languages in a census, they state an approximate accuracy of 90%. In a
country of (approximately) 312 million inhabitants, that’s a margin of error of
(approximately) 31 million people. When it comes to measuring in India, home to
three of the listed languages and over a billion people, the challenges are
multiplied.
The
world’s most spoken language by total speakers
Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests
the following list, which seemingly combines native speakers with non-native
speakers:
- English (1,000 million)
- Mandarin (1,000 million)
- Hindi/Urdu (900 milllion)
- Spanish (450 million)
- Russian/Belarusian (320 million)
- Arabic (250 million)
- Bengali/Sylhetti (250 million)
- Malay/Indonesian (200 million)
- Portuguese (200 million)
- Japanese (130 million)
Estimating the number of second language speakers is extremely difficult
and even the best estimates involve a fair amount of guess work. For example,
the British Council suggests in The Future of English? that around 1.5 billion people in total speak
English – a figure you will often hear – but that is 500 million more than the
estimates used by Encyclopaedia Britannica. Half a
billion people is a large discrepancy.
Most
widely spoken by number of countries/dependencies where the language has
official or de facto status
Compared to the list of total native speakers, this one is relatively
easy to measure. Of the five languages listed, Arabic provides the greatest
challenge because the spoken languages that fall under the umbrella of “Arabic”
are not all mutually intelligible. However, Standard Arabic is used as the
written language in countries where dialects of Arabic are spoken.
- English (64)
- French (43)
- Arabic (26)
- Spanish (21)
- Russian/ Portuguese (11)
This list shows the influence of European colonial histories on the
world’s linguistic map. Languages with a large number of native speakers like
Japanese and Mandarin have not travelled far beyond Asia, unlike the Western
European languages that colonists spread to all corners of the world.
One challenge with compiling this list is that some countries, for
example the USA, do not have an official language (despite various attempts to introduce one). In these cases, the de facto
languages of the country have been counted, which naturally raises questions of
its own. In other places, measuring what counts as a de facto language can be a
challenge.
Languages
of the internet
An interesting way of looking at the development of international
languages is via internet usage.Internetworldstats.com aggregates information from various sources to
create a list of the internet’s top languages by number of users.
- English (27.3%)
- Chinese (22.6%)
- Spanish (7.8%)
- Japanese (5.3%)
- Portuguese (4.3%)
- German (4.0%)
- Arabic (3.3%)
- French (3.2%)
- Russian (2.5%)
- Korean (2.1%)
The rankings are based on internet penetration per country and seem to
assign a generous “value added” dollop of users to English for the many people
who are assumed to speak English as a second language and use it for browsing
the web.
But this doesn’t quite illustrate how central English is to the web. A recent piece
of research by a pair of Googlers
shows the percentage of links going to and from websites in various languages.
Unsurprisingly, many more links are pointed at English-language sites from
other languages than the other way around.
A more informal way of measuring the languages of the internet would be
to look at the number of articles in each language on Wikipedia:
- English (3,801,000)
- German (1,316,000)
- French (1,174,000)
- Italian (861,000)
- Spanish/Polish (844,000)
- Russian (790,000)
- Japanese (778,000)
- Portuguese (704,111)
- Mandarin (385,000)
Which leads on nicely to…
Languages
of publishing
UNESCO measures the number of books published by each
country per year. Correlating the data for various countries, the British
Council gives the following figures:
- English (28%)
- Chinese (13.3%)
- German (11.8%)
- French (7.7%)
- Spanish (6.7%)
- Japanese (5.1%)
- Russian (4.7%)
- Portuguese (4.5%)
- Korean (4.4%)
- Italian (4.0%)
The data are from a couple of years ago but English remains by a long
way the number one language of international publishing.
So, which is the world’s most
widely spoken language?
The tables give an interesting view of the world’s most spoken and
written languages. Three of the world’s ten most widely spoken mother tongues
are barely used for publishing, the internet or international communication:
fields where English is dominant. The three languages are all Indian languages
and educated speakers would be expected to speak English fluently as a second
language.
English remains the world’s most important international language by
most measures except for the number of total native speakers, but measuring
this can be difficult in itself. A report published by the British Council estimates that around 2 billion people will be learning English at any one
time during the next decade. But even then, more than two thirds of the world
will not speak English.source:blog.esl-languages
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