The World

Top Twenty Spoken Languages

The table below presents speaker estimates for the world's top 20 languages (given in millions). The first column lists the languages on the basis of the number of first-language speakers. The second column gives population estimates for those countries where the language has official status. Note that the totals do not always coincide, since some major languages are not official languages of whole countries, and some languages are official languages of multilingual countries. The second column figures are often over-estimates, as by no means everyone in the countries where a second language is recognized (e.g. India) will be fluent.

	Mother-tongue speakers	Official-language populations
1	Chinese (1,000)	English (1,400)
2	English (350)	Chinese (1,000)
3	Spanish (250)	Hindi (700)
4	Hindi (200)	Spanish (280)
5	Arabic (150)	Russian (270)
6	Bengali (150)	French (220)
7	Russia (150)	Arabic (170)
8	Portuguese (135)	Portuguese (160)
9	Japanese (120)	Malay (160)
10	German (100)	Bengali (150)
11	French (70)	Japanese (120)
12	Panjabi (70)	German (100)
13	Javanese (65)	Urdu (85)
14	Bihari (65)	Italian (60)
15	Italian (60)	Korean (60)
16	Korean (60)	Vietnamese (60)
17	Telugu (55)	Persian (55)
18	Tamil (55)	Tagalog (50)
19	Marathi (50)	Thai (50)
20	Vietnamese (50)	Turkish (50)

Source: The Cambridge Factfinder, Cambridge University Press, 1993

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