1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.
Though English is often considered the de facto national language of Australia, the reality is that more than 1 in 5 people in Australia speak a language other than English at home.
1. Norwegian. This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
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.
Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world's language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that's unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first.
Mandarin. Mandarin is likely to be the most spoken language in 2050 because of its vast number of speakers. The economic influence of China will also prove vital for the continued use and spread of Chinese languages around the world.
A 2014 study by the investment bank Natixis even predicted that French would become the world's most widely spoken language by 2050. The authors of the study referred to were demographic growth prospects in Africa. "French is also widespread in many smaller countries," Ammon said.
Distinctive features of the Aussie accent
The Australian accent is famous for its vowel sounds, absence of a strong “r” pronunciation and the use of an inflection – or intonation – at the end of sentences, which can make statements sound like questions.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
English takes the crown as the most common second language around the world with 55 countries speaking it as a second language. France and Russia are second and third with 14 and 13 respectively.
A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period.
In 2022, there were around 1.5 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.1 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers at the time of survey.
Since 1950, the number of unique languages spoken throughout our world has steadily declined. Today, the voices of more than 7,000 languages resound across our planet every moment, but about 2,900 or 41% are endangered. At current rates, about 90% of all languages will become extinct in the next 100 years.
Language extinction
Many of the languages spoken today are in constant extinction. Linguistic predictions say that of 6,000 languages that are globally spoken today, around 600 of them after 100 years will have simplified versions or will not exist at all.
It's unlikely that we'll see a world that speaks one language any time soon. Protecting each individual countries' cultures is a huge barrier, but an important one to ensure our world is as beautifully diverse as it's always been.
English is also seen as the language of the Internet and high tech and that definitely has a negative impact on other languages. Some people claim that the world's linguistic diversity is less preserved because of English domination and that more local languages are declining each year.
Of course, the world is constantly changing, and a new study has proclaimed that there will soon be a new global language on the world scene. Dr. Jeffrey Gill, a Flinders University academic, believes Chinese is set to rise shortly as a prominent global language spoken frequently outside of China and Asia.