Top Languages

The world’s most popular languages, by number of native speakers:

  1. Chinese, 937 million
  2. English, 335 million
  3. Spanish, 332 million
  4. Hindi/Urdu, 291 million
  5. Arabic, 193 million
  6. Bengali, 189 million
  7. Malay/Indonesian, 176 million
  8. Portuguese, 170 million
  9. Russian, 165 million
  10. Japanese, 125 million

“The great thing about human language,” wrote Lewis Thomas, “is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.”