The 100 Most-Spoken Languages in the World, Ranked by Native and Total Speakers

Have you ever wondered what the most spoken language in the world is? I was surprised to find out that it’s English! There is a caveat, however, and it’s that more than half of English speakers in the world speak it as a second language! In fact, there are 1,132,366,380 total speakers of the English language in the world but only 379,007,140 of them are native speakers! Mandarin is actually the clear front runner for the language with most native speakers in the world with 917,868,640 total native speakers. That is a whole lot of people.

If this stuff is as interesting to you as it is to us you’re probably now wondering what the other top most spoken languages are. Well, as you’re probably already aware, you’re in the right place! Today’s infographic comes to us from Word.Tips and is an absolutely gorgeous chart that visualized the language “family trees” of the top 100 most-spoken languages in the world.

We found it setting the world on fire at the top of the /r/Design subreddit and new we had to share it.

Click below to view this infographic in it’s glorious full size!

Some takeaways that we felt were especially interesting:

• The Hungarian, Korean, and Japanese languages all stand out on their own and are not related to any of the other 100 most spoken languages.
• Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are not related from a spoken language point of view. Although their written languages do share some influence.
• The Indo-European language tree is HUGE. It has everything from English, to Hindi, to Bengali, to Russian, all sharing the same roots!
• There is a language called Modern Standard Arabic that has zero native speakers but over 273 million total speakers. From our limited research, it is a language that is used for official purposes and for news and television broadcasts that people who speak many different Arabic dialects can understand but it is different from the languages people speak on a day-to-day basis.
• I also spent far too long looking for Cantonese on this visualization only to find out it’s also called Yue and actually has a much smaller number of speakers than I would have guessed.

Let the PixlParade team know if you have any suggestions for cool content to cover!

P.S. No big deal but this is PixlParade.com’s 100th post!