Top 10 Spoken Languages

When it comes to ranking languages of the world, there are two main ways to compute the list. One method is to rank by mother tongue: how many people consider the language to be their mother tongue.

The second method is to rank by official language. We have scanned the various sources, cross-referenced them, tried to understand the discrepancies, and computed the following list of the ten most widely spoken languages on planet Earth.

French (Number 10)
Over 130 million inhabitants of this planet speak French. Mainly, they can be found in France, but French's reach extends to Africa, North America as well as in parts of Asia and South America. Up to the French Revolution, France's imperialistic nature led to the expansion of "la langue Francaise" and its presence is worldwide to this day.

Malay-Indonesian (Number 9)
Malaysia and Indonesia share lots in common, one of the main attributes being the language. There are many dialects, but the most popular is Indonesian. Malay/Indonesian is spoken by over 170 million people, and that's a whole lotta people.

Portuguese (Number 8)
After winning its independence from Spain in the 12th century, Portugal's influence expanded rapidly thanks to famous explorers like Vasco de Gama. Because of their work, the Portuguese speaking contingency reaches 175 million -- the bulk of Portuguese speakers hail from Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, France, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Portugal, of course.

Bengali (Number 7)
India's other language, Bengali is also spoken in Bangladesh and Singapore. In fact, Bangladesh is a country of over 120 million, most of whom speak Bengali. Combined, there are over 210 million Bengali speaking people worldwide.

Arabic (Number 6)
The official language in roughly 25 nations, over 260 million people speak Arabic, from Iraq to Morocco. Both Farsi and Urdu use the Arabic script but differ from Arabic -- Arabic being a Semitic language whereas Farsi and Urdu are Indo-European ones.

Russian (Number 5)
Russia's vast geographic reach and populous nation makes it sit at number 5 with 275 million speakers. But given the low life expectancy among men there and Arabic's accelerated growth, Russia looks like it will slip in ranking over the next decade.

Spanish (Number 4)
With anywhere from 350 to 400 million speakers, many lists have Spanish surpassing English, and by most standards, that is right. The official language in just over 20 nations including Andorra, Belize, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain, U.S., and Venezuela, Spanish weighs in at numero cuatro.

English (Number 3)
The "lowest common denominator," if one were to exist, English is the universal language with 500 million speakers worldwide. The language is officially spoken in over 50 countries, a record. Examples include: Australia, Brunei, Cameroon, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, U.K., and U.S., not to mention many Caribbean states.

Hindi/Urdu (Number 2)
Ironically, Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language. In Pakistan, Hindi is modified and written in Arabic script, whereas in India, it is written in the Devanagari script and called Hindi. Combined, 600 million human beings speak Hindi. While every expert would assert that India's population will surpass China's, chances are that there will always be more Mandarin-speaking people because English is widely spoken in India, but not in China.

Mandarin Chinese (Number 1)
Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people; making it the most widely spoken language on Earth. Besides China, Mandarin is spoken in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, and Thailand. Mandarin is fairly sophisticated because it can be spoken in four tones. But once you begin, you'll have a billion people to chat with...

It is interesting to note that both German and Japanese are spoken by over 100 million!