1. Chinese — 1.3 Billion Native Speakers. Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 900 million of whom speak Mandarin — but there's no doubt it's the most spoken language in the world.
According to Ethnologue, Chinese (and all of its varieties such as Mandarin and Wu) is by far the most spoken language across the world with 1.31 billion speakers. That's approximately 16 percent of the world's population.
In 2023, there were around 1.5 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.1 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers at the time of survey.
Mandarin language, also called Northern Chinese, Chinese (Pinyin) Guanhua (“Officials' Language”), or (Wade-Giles romanization) Kuan-hua, the most widely spoken form of Chinese.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Spanish – 534 million speakers
A Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish is known for its melodious sounds and passionate intonations. With over 460 million native speakers worldwide, it is the second-most spoken language in the world.
Yes, Some Languages Are Faster Than Others
As we've already mentioned, Japanese is considered the fastest language in the world. It is always mentioned as the first on the list.
Ongota. Ongota is one of the least spoken languages in the world. Only 12 people in the world used to speak this language. These people live in the Southwestern region of Ethiopia You can hear this language in the village which is located to the West of the Weyt,o river.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish are the six official languages of the United Nations. English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat and are used in day-to-day professional exchanges.
When you say a person is trilingual, it means that he or she is fluent in three languages. Thirteen percent of the global population is trilingual. A person who can speak four or more languages is multilingual.
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.
The oldest living language, still in use to date, might be Tamil. This fact is widely debated across linguistic communities. Tamil is proposed to be first attested somewhere between 5320 BC and 8th century CE. The Dravidian language has speakers in Southern India and Sri Lanka.
First off, the script used to write Hindi, Devanagari, is considered particularly hard to get a hang of. The script is also what's called an abugida, meaning that the individual characters represent a consonant and vowel combination, rather than a single vowel or consonant.
Naturally, homophones exist in other languages as well, but in Japanese, it's far more common. The second factor apart from homophones, where things literally sound the same, is that the syllables and consonant combinations are so few that it's hard to recall vocabulary when they sound so similar.
Old English – the earliest form of the English language – was spoken and written in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c. 1150 (thus it continued to be used for some decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066).
It depends on what you are planning to do with your language after you've learned it. If you plan to do business in China or with a Chinese-speaking company, then Mandarin is definitely the way to go. If, however, you plan to settle in Hong Kong, then it would be worth it to pick up Cantonese.
In modern English, mandarin is also used to refer to any (though usually a senior) civil servant, often in a satirical context, particularly in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries.