Top languages spoken by native speakers
- Mandarin Chinese 12.3%,
- Spanish 6%,
- English 5.1%,
- Arabic 5.1%,
- Hindi 3.5%,
- Bengali 3.3%,
- Portuguese 3%,
- Russian 2.1%,
- Japanese 1.7%,
- Punjabi, Western 1.3%,
- Javanese 1.1% (2018 est.)
note 1
percents are for “first language” speakers only; the six UN languages – Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian, and Spanish (Castilian) – are the mother tongue or second language of about 45% of the world’s population, and are the official languages in more than half the states in the world; some 400 languages have more than a million first-language speakers
note 2
all told, there are an estimated 7,100 languages spoken in the world; approximately 80% of these languages are spoken by less than 100,000 people; about 150 languages are spoken by less than 10 people; communities that are isolated from each other in mountainous regions often develop multiple languages; Papua New Guinea, for example, boasts about 840 separate languages
note 3
approximately 2,300 languages are spoken in Asia, 2,140, in Africa, 1,310 in the Pacific, 1,060 in the Americas, and 290 in Europe (2018)