ETHNOLOGUE LIST OF MOST SPOKEN LANGUAGES

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 The Ethnologue is sometimes criticised for using out-of-date data, but there is no available fully authoritative source for numbers of first language speakers which uses the same criteria for counting in each case.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, based on the 15th edition (2005), aims to count first language speakers only (though there are some difficulties with this criterion, as with any other, caused by issues such as bilingualism, differing perceptions of cultural identity and the questions of when language varieties are to be considered different languages or dialects). It also counts macrolanguages, as defined by the Ethnologue, such that Chinese and Arabic are counted as united languages rather than by the varieties also listed, such as Mandarin Chinese or Egyptian Arabic. The year bracketed next to the number of speakers is the year given in the Ethnologue for when the data was taken (for the country with most speakers).

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	'Chinese'	1,205m (1999)	People's Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan)	This figure includes all varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin and Cantonese, which are not necessarily mutually intelligible
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) (Khariboli dialect only)	India, Fiji	Speakers of the main Khariboli dialect. Indian census (1991) figure is 337m, and represents the actual count of native speakers of all Hindi dialects.
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	'Standard German'	95.4m (1994)	Germany, Austria, (Switzerland)	This figure seems to include Swiss German, even though this is listed under a different code. Ethnologue divides "German" into 18 dialects[1] (Middle and Upper German, not including Low German and Yiddish), totalling to 114.2 million. Including Yiddish and Low Saxon, the total is 118 million.
11	'Javanese'	75.5m (1989)	Indonesia
12	'Telugu'	69.7m (1997)	India
13	'Marathi'	68m (1997)	India
14	'Vietnamese'	67.4m (1999)	Vietnam
15	'Korean'	67m (1986)	South Korea, North Korea
16	'Tamil'	66m (1997)	India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia
17	'French'	64.9m	France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, French Guiana, French Polynesia	Figure does not include significant populations in countries such as Haiti and Mauritius, where speakers are said to speak creoles. 14th edition (2000) gives 77m total.
18	'Italian'	61.5m	Italy, San Marino	'Population includes some of whom are native bilinguals of Italian and regional varieties, and some of whom may use Italian as second language'
19	'Western Panjabi'	60.8m (2000)	Pakistan	Figure does not include Eastern Panjabi, spoken in India, 27.1m
20	'Urdu'	60.5m (1997)	India, Pakistan

Contents

See also

External links

See also

★ List of languages by number of native speakers - a similar list but from various sources

★ Ethnologue
Portuguese is also the official language of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe and Angola. In Angola, Mozambique and São Tomé, Portuguese is probably spoken by more than 5% of the population.

External links

★ The Ethnologue

★ List of top 100 languages in 13th edition of Ethnologue (1996). Does not conflate macrolanguages

★ Different lists of the most spoken languages (the Ethnologue list is from a previous, not the 2005, edition).

★ Encarta list, based on data from Ethnologue, but some figures (e.g. for Arabic) widely vary from it