List of languages by number of native speakers

Below is a List of languages by number of native speakers.

Over half the world's population speaks the 15 most used native languages. They are listed here. They are from the Swedish Nationalencyklopedin (2007, 2010).

The distinction between language and dialect is often not clear. Some mutually intelligible versions have been unified. These include Indonesian and Malay; Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian. It does not include standard Hindi and Urdu. Hindustani has been divided here into the sociolinguistic units of Hindi and Urdu, but at least 100 million speakers of some Hindi dialects are not counted below.

Rank	Language	Native speakers	% of world population	Mainly spoken in	Language family
1	Mandarin	955,000,000	14.4%	East Asia	Sino-Tibetan
2	Spanish	386,000,000	6.15%	Latin America, United States, Spain, Equational Guinea	Indo-European
3	English	360,000,000	5.43%	United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand	Indo-European
4	Hindi	310,000,000	4.70%	South Asia	Indo-European
5	Arabic	295,000,000	4.43%	Middle East, North Africa	Afro-Asiatic
6	Portuguese	215,000,000	3.27%	Brazil, Portugal	Indo-European
7	Bengali	205,000,000	3.11%	South Asia	Indo-European
8	Russian	155,000,000	2.33%	Eastern Europe, Siberia	Indo-European
9	Japanese	125,000,000	1.90%	Japan	Japanese
10	Punjabi	102,000,000	1.44%	South Asia	Indo-European
11	German	89,000,000	1.39%	Central Europe	Indo-European
12	Vietnamese	85,000,000	1.34%	Vietnam	Austroasiatic
13	Javanese	82,000,000	1.25%	Indonesia	Austronesian
14	Wu	80,000,000	1.20%	China	Sino-Tibetan
15	Malay/Indonesian	77,000,000	1.16%	Southeast Asia	Austronesian
16	Telugu	76,000,000	1.15%	India	Dravidian

Related pages

• List of endangered languages