Learn Spanish Online Sydney

To speak and to communicate with each other is probably one of the most important skills that we can manage. We use different languages to tell others what we think, want, see or hear. During centuries the languages has been forming and developing as everything else. Nowadays there are over 7100 languages in the world, moreover all of them have many dialects which are not counted. What are the most spoken languages in the World? There are only 12 languages of 7102 that are spoken by more than half of 7.2 billion people living on the Earth. It is not easy to measure exactly how many native speakers has each language because each country uses a different method to get the number of first-language speakers. The following data are from Ethnologue, language encyclopaedia published by SIL International.   Top 10 world’s most widely spoken languages by number of native speakers 1. Chinese First-language speakers: 1 197 000 000 Chinese is a macrolanguage in China where are another 13 Chineseindividual languages. For instance, Chinese “dialects” such as Cantonese, Gan or Hakka, etc. are as different from one another as Romance languages – Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian. The most used and spread is Mandarin Chinese that is spoken by 70% of Chinese speakers. In total is Chinese spoken in 33 countries. 2. Spanish First-language speakers: 399 000 000 Spanish is an official language in more than 20 countries and is spread in Europe, Southern and Northern America and some parts of Africa. Therefore exists many forms and dialects of Spanish. 3. English First-language speakers: 335 000 000 English is the most spoken language in the world but as we count only first-language speakers it is on the 3rd place. English is spoken in 101 countries and is an official in 94 states (67 sovereign states and 27 non-sovereign entities). 4. Hindi – Urdu First-language speakers: 260 000 000 Hindi which originally comes from India is now spoken in 4 countries and with 260 mil. offirst-language speakers is the 4th most spoken language. 5. Arabic First-language speakers: 242 000 000 Arabic as same as Chinese is a macrolanguage and Modern Standard Arabic (or Literary Arabic) is the only official form of the Arabic language. There are 18 Arabic individual languages – collectively called Colloquial Arabic – which are radically different from the literary language. 6. Portuguese First-language speakers: 203 000 000 Portuguese originally comes from Portugal but thanks to the expansion of Portuguese colonizers it spread to Brazil and also some parts of Africa. 7. Bengali First-language speakers: 189 000 000 Bengali language is spoken in India, Singapore and Nepal but it is mostly spoken in Bangladesh where the Bengali comes from. 8. Russian First-language speakers: 166 000 000 Russian is nowadays an official language in 4 countries- Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Belarus. In the previous century Russian was spoken in the whole Soviet Union, therefore it is stillwidely spoken also in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Estonia and other countries that used to be the the part of the Soviet Union. 9. Japanese First-language speakers: 128 000 000 Japanese language is in 99% spoken in Japan (127 mil. Speakers). The rest of native Japanese speakers is spread in the rest of the world. 10. Javanese First-language speakers: 84 308 000 Javanese is spoken by Javanese people on the Indonesian islands- Bali, Sumatra and mainly in the central and eastern parts of Java. Source: www.ethnologue.com (2015) Share with others