Top Spoken Languages In The World

Telugu 79 Million Speakers

It is another of the languages of overpopulated India, spoken mainly in the west of the country .

It is currently the fastest-growing language in the United States. Between 2010 and 2017 alone, the number of speakers in this country increased by 86%.

According to the Fundación Gente Télugu, the increase in speakers in the United States is due to the strong links between the city of Hyderabad, in India, and the engineering industries in America.

Tegulu is the mother tongue of many of Asias best engineers.

Most Spoken Languages In The World

There are about 7,100 distinct languages spoken across the entire universe but the most vital languages for global business expansion are just a handful.

English is the de facto language for international business but for professional networking, travel, academic collaboration, and other aspects, people prefer to deal in their native languages. This is where translation paves the way to international business and exposure to reach unexplored global audiences and niches.

There are ten other languages that also extend their usage in communication, which can be referred to as the most spoken languages in the world. English is an international language spoken around the world every single day. On a rough sketch, half of the worlds population speak the below 10 languages as they are native speakers of the same.

Note: This list is about the languages spoken as the first language or native speakers.

Here are the Top 10 most spoken languages in the world:

Western Punjabi 664 Million Speakers

Punjabi is divided into 2 different dialects. Western Punjabi is spoken as a first language in the Punjab province of Pakistan, and Easter Punjabi is spoken mostly in the Punjab state in India. Western Punjabi is not considered an official language of Pakistan, so Punjabi speakers use Urdu or English for official purposes.

While Punjabi is largely based on Sanskrit, Western Punjabi has many loan words Persian, Arabic, and Urdu because of its proximity to these languages.

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Languages Used On The Internet

Slightly over half of the homepages of the most visited websites on the World Wide Web are in English, with varying amounts of information available in many other languages. Other top languages are Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, French, German and Japanese.

Of the more than 7,000 existing languages, only a few hundred are recognized as being in use for Web pages on the World Wide Web.

Arabic 273 Million Speakers

The beauty of this language continues to amaze linguists around the world. As it has sounds in its pronunciation that are alien to the Western world, there has always been a fear of delving into its learning.

However, the experience of learning it has surprised a growing number of enthusiasts initially attracted to trade with Middle Eastern countries.

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Size Of Genomes Across Different Organisms

Human DNA is made up of approximately 3.2 billion base pairs that are tightly wound up and stored in our cells. If you were to unwind and measure the DNA stored in a single human cell, it would be about 2 meters long!

This lengthy DNA is stored in pairs of chromosomes. A full collection of chromosomes, or an entire set of genetic information, is referred to as a genome.

Genomes vary in size, depending on the organism. Here is a look at 24 different species and the size of their genomes, from animals and plants to bacteria and viruses:

The Marbled Lungfish has the largest known animal genome. Its genome is made up of 130 billion base pairs, which is about 126.8 billion more than the average human genome.

Comparatively, small viruses and bacteria have fewer base pairs. The Hepatitis D virus has only 1,700 base pairs, while E. coli bacteria has 4.6 million. Interestingly, research has not found a link between the size of a species genome and the organisms size or complexity.

In fact, there are still a ton of unanswered questions in the field of genome research. Why do some species have small genomes? Why do some have a ton of redundant DNA? These are still questions being investigated by scientists today.

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The Importance Of Learning Languages

Knowing different languages is always helpful. It opens an array of opportunities to travel and work across the world. Languages are interlinked with cultures. Learning a new language also opens you up to new cultures and understanding them. In the modern world, proficiency in more than one language is advantageous. Be it in a professional environment or a learning experience, learning a new language will expand knowledge and broaden your opportunities.

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What About Second Languages

Nearly 43% of the worlds population is bilingual, with the ability to switch between two languages with ease.

From the data, second language speakers can be calculated by looking at the difference between native and total speakers, as a proportion of the total. For example, 66% of English speakers learned it as a second language.

Swahili surprisingly has the highest ratio of L2 speakers to total speakersalthough it only has 16 million native speakers, this shoots up to 98 million total speakers. Overall, 82% of Swahili speakers know it as a second language.

Swahili is listed as a national or official language in several African countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its likely that the movement of people from rural areas into big cities in search of better economic opportunities, is whats boosting the adoption of Swahili as a second language.

Indonesian is another similar example. With a 78% proportion of L2 speakers compared to total speakers, this variation on the Malay language has been used as the lingua franca across the islands for a long time. In contrast, only 17% of Mandarin speakers know it as a second language, perhaps because it is one of the most challenging languages to learn.

Javanese 683 Million Speakers

Javanese is spoken mainly on the island of Java, an Indonesian island. There are 3 main dialects: Central Javanese, Eastern Javanese, and Western Javanese. Most Javanese speakers also speak Indonesian for official purposes and to speak with the non-Javanese speakers in their country.

There are a concentrated number of Javanese speakers in Malaysia and Singapore, and there are even immigrant communities that speak Javanese as far away as Sri Lanka and Suriname.

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Ever Wondered What The Most Widely Spoken Languages Are In The World Although There Are Currently More Than 7000 Languages More Than Half Of The World’s Population Speak 23 Of Them Only

Knowing this information is essential to understand if youâre planning a global expansion strategy and levelling up in the business world. Additionally, whether in the workplace or personal development, knowledge of more than one language offers us new horizons and the opportunity to expand our cultural understanding.

From the languages that English speakers will find easy to learn, to the more difficult languages, we’ve compiled this all-encompassing list for you based on real data.

So keep reading to find out what the most spoken languages are.

Bengali 234 Million Native Speakers

Bengali, often referred to as Bangla follows Portuguese as a language among the most spoken ones in the world. Although it is only spoken as a native language in a few different countries, mostly in Bangladesh and India, this language has around 234 million speakers, which leaves it very close to Portuguese. These two countries sing their national anthem in this language.

Note: In previous editions of the Ethnologue, Standard Arabic was considered to be the 5th most spoken language in the world, with around 270 million native speakers. However after 2022 edition, it is no longer considered a L1 Language, or native language.

You know Arabic is considered to be one of the 7 Most Difficult Languages to learn in the World?

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The 10 Most Spoken Languages In The World And The Fastest Ones

Home » Blog » The 10 Most Spoken Languages in the World and The Fastest Ones

What are the most spoken languages in the world? One of the best linguistic resources, The Ethnologue Catalogue of World Languages, lists 6.912 living languages. About 6% of them have more than a million speakers each, and collectively account for 94% of the world population.

Before discovering the most spoken languages did you know that some languages are faster than others?

Some languages have a higher rate of syllables per second, so they are technically faster than others.

What are the fastest languages?

Unfortunately, no extensive studies have been conducted on the speed of speech in different languages. The most recent essay on the subject was published in 2019 in Science Advances.

This report postulates that not all languages condense the same amount of information in a single syllable.

There are complex languages, like Vietnamese, where messages are transmitted with a bunch of syllables heavily loaded with meaning and there are simpler languages, such as Japanese or Spanish, where the information load in each syllable is much lighter resulting in the need for more syllables and longer constructions.

This is known as language efficiency. And based on it, some languages are more efficient than others.

And of all the languages examined in this study, which ones are the fastest, you may be wondering.

Its about time. Here there are the most spoken languages in the world:

German 1346 Million Speakers

German is an official language of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium , Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg. People also speak it in parts of Italy and Poland.

German is a language of business, and speaking German can open up many opportunities to work in large companies anywhere in the world. Some of the biggest car manufacturers come from Germany, including Audi, Volkswagen, and Mercedes.

It is also the second most spoken language in scientific research. Germany is a significant contributor to international research and development efforts, and welcomes scientists from abroad to work in fellowships throughout Germany.

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Wu Chinese 818 Million Speakers

Wu is a group of dialects that are part of the larger language family called Sino-Tibetan. The Wu dialects have been spoken for over 2,500 years and are related to languages like Cantonese and Mandarin, which developed independently.

Wu is classified as a literary language in the modern era, but its not used in schools primarily because there was no unified written form for the entire dialect for many centuries.

Unlike Mandarin, Wu speakers dont use simplified Chinese characters. There are few similarities to Mandarin, and Wus vocabulary has many loan words from other languages like Japanese or Vietnamese.

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Marathi 74 Million Speakers

Another language of India. There are 22 official languages in that country according to its Constitution, although the two main ones are English and Hindi.

The most beautiful thing about Marathi is its amazing literary tradition, which, through its famous writers, has put India several times on the map of world literature.

It is the language spoken in the city of Bombay.

Top 10 Languages By The Number Of Native Speakers

These are the most widely spoken languages in the world based solely on the number of native speakers.

The number of native speakers varies significantly Ethnologue estimates 1.3 billion native speakers, with around 1.1 billion speaking Mandarin but theres little doubt its the most commonly spoken language on the planet. This is the language to study if you want to learn a language spoken by one in every six people on the planet. Because Chinese is a tonal language with hundreds of logograms, studying it will keep you occupied for a long time.

If we solely consider native speakers, Spanish has a slight lead over English, with 471 million speakers. Spanish is the greatest language to learn if you wish to travel across continents. The politics of language and related identity are fiercely disputed, as they are for all of the languages on this list. Ask Catalan or Quechua speakers if Spanish is their native tongue, and you will receive a totally different answer. However, it is the predominant language of the vast majority of South and Central America, Spain, and, ahem, big swaths of the United States.

For example, English students learned to say I before E except after C.

When it comes to most English words, such as friend and believe, this rule stands true. There are, however, exceptions, such as science and weirdness.

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Mandarin Chinese 929 Million Native Speakers

The languages that takes the number 1 place in our list and therefore, the most spoken language in the world is, by far, Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is only one of the many Chinese dialects spoken in China, but it is considered the Official Language of the Peoples Republic of China. Because of this reason, mandarin is often referred as Standard Chinese.

China has around 1.4 billion inhabitants, around 70% of all Chinese speakers speak mandarin as their father language. This leaves us with about 929 Million Mandarin speakers over a large area in China and roughly 33 countries around the world.

In this other article we will tell you about the Oldest Languages in the World

The Most Spoken Language In The World Is English

As much as we would have liked to create a bit of suspense, the result is no surprise.

Total number of English speakers: 1.452 billion

Where is English spoken?

There are 1.452 billion English speakers spread out across the continents, and counting! Which is a small advantage to those that want to learn it. Whether youre in Africa, Asia, Oceania, or Europe, youll always come across at least one country that has English as one of its official languages. Get ready for some fun facts

Did you know?

• English is the official first language of over a hundred countries. Although not the one you might think
• English is not the official language in the United States it doesnt have one!
• English is one of the most influential languages in the world right now. Because apart from being spoken as an official language by millions of people, it is also the first second language chosen by many people around the globe.

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Spanish 475 Million Native Speakers

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world and is spoken in 31 countries which are mostly around the Latin America and in Spain. This language has about 475 million native speakers in addition to the nonnative speakers.

Spanish originated in Spain at the Castile region. Spanish is regarded as an easy language to learn because of its phonetic nature meaning that its pronunciation is in the way it looks. In fact, the second most translated book was in Spanish.

Some Languages Arent So Lucky What Are The Least Spoken Languages

Like I said before, people around the world speak over 7,000 languages. Some, like the ones you read about in the list above, are very widespread languages, counting millions of speakers.

Other languages are spoken by only a few people, and are at severe risk of extinction. Take Ayapaneco, for instance. This language, born in present-day Mexico, supposedly had just two fluent speakers left in 2011. And according to a Guardian article, they arent on speaking terms right now! The article tells the sad story of how this language became so critically endangered, and the measures people are taking to save it.

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Not Out Of The Woods Yet

By some estimates, 30% of the globes carbon emissions are absorbed by forests each year. In order to keep our global average temperatures at 1.5°C, action needs to ramp up to diminish deforestation. One solution is to open up funding and participation to the private sector and bridge their efforts with that of the public sector.

Swift action is required in order to slow deforestation and decelerate rising average temperatures. See how The LEAF Coalition, a public-private initiative is accelerating climate action by providing results-based finance to countries committed to protecting tropical forests.