1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-
Which are the most widely spoken languages in the world? Some, such as English and Spanish seem obvious, but others may surprise you. Around 7,139 languages are spoken in the world, 90% of which are used in communities of less than 100,000 people, such as tribes or dialects within certain populations.
Currently, these are the 10 most spoken languages in the world in 2023, sorted by number of mother language speakers: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Yue chinese, Vietnamese.
Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish are the six official languages of the United Nations. English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat and are used in day-to-day professional exchanges.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Co-author Professor Lindell Bromham said that of the world's 7,000 recognized languages, around half are currently endangered: “We found that without immediate intervention, language loss could triple in the next 40 years. And by the end of this century, 1,500 languages could cease to be spoken.”
Some estimates put the total of the world's trilingual speakers at just over 1 billion people. That's 13% of everyone on Earth! Being bilingual (speaking two languages) is much more common, though still somewhat rare within English-speaking countries.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
Kawishana is the rarest language in the world.
Is it really the hardest language? As we've seen, then, English is pretty challenging. But it's not the only contender for the World's Most Difficult Language. Other notoriously tricky languages include Finnish, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin.
Local Names for Mandarin
Mandarin is the term used through much of the Western world, but the Chinese themselves refer to the language as 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà), 国语 (guó yǔ), or 華语 (huá yǔ). 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) literally means “common language” and is the term used in mainland China.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Except for Frisian, Dutch is linguistically the closest language to English, with both languages being part of the West Germanic linguistic family. This means many Dutch words are cognates with English (meaning they share the same linguistic roots), giving them similar spelling and pronunciation.
One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish.
Linguists point to how the loss of languages is worsened by climate change. As temperatures rise, so does the rate at which crucial elements of indigenous culture become extinct across the world. It is calculated that, at the current rate, around 90% of all languages will disappear in the next 100 years.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.