List of languages by total number of speakers

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cazort (talk | contribs) at 18:45, 6 October 2017 (removed "Altaic" as modern consensus is that this grouping is largely discredited. added Oghuz as specific sub-grouping within Turkic languages). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

For languages by only native speakers, see List of languages by number of native speakers.

A number of sources have compiled lists of languages by their number of speakers. However, all such lists should be used with caution.

  • First, it is difficult to define exactly what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, some languages including Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages and sometimes language families. Similarly, Hindi is sometimes considered a collective language including Mewari, Chhattisgarhi, Bhojpuri etc., but together with Urdu it also is often considered a single language Hindustani.
  • Second, there is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. For example, English has about 400 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers.[1]

Ethnologue (2017 20th edition)

The following languages are listed as having 50 million or more total speakers in the 2017 edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International based in the United States.[2] Speaker totals are generally not reliable, as they add together estimates from different dates and (usually uncited) sources; language information is not collected on most national censuses.

Rank Language Family L1 speakers L1 Rank L2 speakers Total
1 Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese) Sino-Tibetan, Sinitic 897 million 1 193 million 1.09 billion
2 English Indo-European, Germanic 371 million 3 611 million 983 million
3 Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu)[Note 1] Indo-European, Indo-Aryan 329 million 4 215 million 544 million
4 Spanish Indo-European, Romance 436 million 2 91 million 527 million
5 Arabic Afro-Asiatic, Semitic 290 million (2017) 5 132 million 422 million[5][6]
6 Malay (incl. Indonesian and Malaysian) Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian 77 million (2007) 15 204 million 281 million[7]
7 Russian Indo-European, Slavic 153 million 8 113 million (2010) 267 million
8 Bengali Indo-European, Indo-Aryan 242 million 6 19 million in Bangladesh (2011) 261 million
9 Portuguese Indo-European, Romance 218 million 7 11 million 229 million
10 French Indo-European, Romance 76 million 17 153 million 229 million
11 Hausa Afro-Asiatic, Chadic 85 million 11 65 million 150 million[8]
12 Punjabi Indo-European, Indo-Aryan 148 million[9] 9 ? 148 million
13 Japanese Japonic 128 million 10 1 million (2010)[10] 129 million
14 German Indo-European, Germanic 76 million 18 52 million 129 million
15 Persian Indo-European, Iranian 60 million (2009) 25 61 million[11] 121 million[11]
16 Swahili Niger–Congo language, Coastal Tanzanian, Bantu 16 million 26 91 million 107 million
17 Telugu Dravidian 80 million (2011) 13 12 million in India (2011) 92 million
18 Javanese Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian 84 million (2000) 12 ? 84 million
19 Wu Chinese (incl. Shanghainese) Sino-Tibetan, Chinese 80 million (2013) 14 80 million
20 Korean Koreanic 77 million (2008–2010) 16 ? 77 million
21 Tamil Dravidian 67 million (2001) 23 8 million in India 75 million
22 Marathi Indo-European, Indo-Aryan 71 million (2001) 20 3 million in India 74 million
23 Yue Chinese (incl. Cantonese) Sino-Tibetan, Chinese 72 million 19 ? 72 million
24 Turkish Turkic, Oghuz 71 million 21 <1 million 71 million
25 Vietnamese Austroasiatic, Viet–Muong 68 million 22 ? 68 million
26 Italian Indo-European, Romance 63 million 24 3 million 66 million

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Refers to Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu. Modern Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible and are considered by linguists to be dialects of the same language; the two distinct registers are the outcome of nationalist tendencies.[3] The Census of India defines Hindi on a loose and broad basis. In addition to Standard Hindi, it incorporates a set of other Indo-Aryan languages written in Devanagari script including Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Dhundhari etc. under Hindi group which have more than 422 million native speakers as on 2001.[4] However, the census also acknowledges Standard Hindi, the above mentioned languages and others as separate mother tongues of Hindi language and provides individual figures for all these languages.[4]

References

  1. ^ Crystal, David (March 2008). "Two thousand million?". English Today. doi:10.1017/S0266078408000023.
  2. ^ "Summary by language size". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
  3. ^ Abdul Jamil Khan (2006). Urdu/Hindi: an artificial divide. Algora. p. 290. ISBN 978-0-87586-437-2.
  4. ^ a b Abstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues – 2000, Census of India, 2001
  5. ^ "Världens 100 största språk 2010" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2010), in Nationalencyklopedin
  6. ^ "World Arabic Language Day | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization". www.unesco.org. Retrieved 2017-07-14.
  7. ^ Indonesia 258 million (World Bank, 2015); Malaysia 19.4 million Bumiputera (Dept of Statistics, Malaysia, 2016); Brunei 0.43 million (World Bank, 2015); Singapore 0.5 million (University of Hawaii 2012); Thailand 3 million (University of Hawaii, 2012)
  8. ^ "Hausa speakers in Nigeria now 120m– Communique - Vanguard News". vanguardngr.com. Retrieved 2017-04-26.
  9. ^ Lahnda/Western Punjabi 116.6 million Pakistan (c. 2014). Eastern Punjabi: 28.2 million India (2001), other countries: 1.1 million. Ethnologue 19.
  10. ^ "Japanese". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
  11. ^ a b Windfuhr, Gernot: The Aryan Languages, Routledge 2009, p. 418.

External links

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