User:Drmaik/languages by ethnologue
This list gives the most spoken languages in the world according to the Ethnologue, a widely cited reference for languages around the world. The Ethnologue is sometimes criticised for using out-of-date data, but there is no available fully authoritative source for numbers of first language speakers which uses the same criteria for counting in each case. Another tendency of the Ethnologue is to separate what many others (sometimes including speakers of the varieties) consider to be single languages: see for example comments in this article on English and German.
This list aims to count first language speakers only (though there are some difficulties with this criteria, as with any other, caused by issues such as bilingualism, differing perceptions of identity and the questions of when language varieties are to be considered different languages or dialects.
| Ranking by number of native speakers | Language | Number of speakers | Where spoken natively by more than 5% of the population (in order of population, down to 20,000 speakers) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mandarin Chinese | 873m (1999) | People's Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan) | This figure does not include other dialects of Chinese such as Cantonese |
| 2 | Spanish | 322.3m (1995) | Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, United States, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Panama, Belize, Andorra, Gibraltar | |
| 3 | English | 309.4m (1984) | United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore, Bermuda, Northern Mariana Islands, Bahamas, Guam, Cayman Islands | Does not include significant populations in countries such as Jamaica and Guyana, where speakers are said to speak creoles. |
| 4 | Arabic | 206m (1998) | Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Mauritania, Palestinian Territories, Israel, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Chad, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Djibouti, Western Sahara | Figure from all Arabic dialects, which are not necessarily mutually intelligible |
| 5 | Hindi | 180.8m (1991) | India, Fiji | Indian census (1991) figure is 337m, which may be seen by some to reflect ethnic identity rather than actual language spoken, or mutual intelligibility. |
| 6 | Portuguese | 177.5m (1998) | Brazil, Portugal | |
| 7 | Bengali | 171.1m (1994) | Bangladesh, India | |
| 8 | Russian | 145m (2000) | Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Israel, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, Turkmenistan | |
| 9 | Japanese | 122.4m (1985) | Japan | |
| 10 | German | 95.4m (1994) | Germany, Austria | The Ethnologue treats Schwyzerdütsch as a separate language, so Switzerland is not included. |
See also
- List of languages by number of native speakers A list similar to this, but from various sources, and often unreferenced.
- Ethnologue
External links
- The Ethnologue
- Different lists of the most spoken languages (the Ethnologue list is from a previous, not the 2005 edition).
Next languages
javanese 75.5 telugu 69.7 marathi 68.0 Vietnamese 67.4 Korean 67 Tamil 66 french 64.9m Italian 61.5 Punjabi 60.8 Urdu 60.5
Turkish 50.6 Thai 20.2 + 26 other dialects = 46.2 Gujarati 46.1 Polish 42.7 Kannada 35.3 Farsi 24.3 + Dari 7.6= 31.9 for macro