Language-family: Germanic, a sub-family of Indo-European. Number of non-native speakers: 611 million It's estimated that you need to learn 2,000-3,000 characters to read a newspaper – an educated Chinese person will know about 8,000! 2. There are two main versions – “traditional” characters, used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, and “simplified” characters, used in China, Singapore, and Malaysia. Mandarin is written using Chinese characters (sometimes called “Han characters”), an ancient pictorial system where each symbol represents a different word. Since Mandarin is more common in northern China, it's sometimes referred to as beifanghua (北方话) – “Northern Dialects”.

Historically, it was also called Guanhua – “the speech of officials”. The native name for Mandarin, Putonghua, literally means “common speech”, although in Taiwan people call it Guoyu – “national language”. It's an official language in the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore. It's actually a group of related languages, of which Mandarin Chinese is by far the biggest. People sometimes speak of “Chinese” as if it's a single language. Name in the language itself: 普通话 (Putonghua) Number of non-native speakers: 193 million The Top 10 Most Spoken Languages in the World 1. Here's the best estimate, at the time of writing, as to the most-spoken languages in the world – going by total number of speakers, not just natives. With that being said, it's possible to come up with some rough rankings. Secondly, where do you draw the boundary between a language and a dialect? How different do two “dialects” have to be before they're considered separate languages entirely? There's often no clear answer – and the answer you give can significantly affect a language's position in the “most-spoken” rankings.

There are a few complications that make it hard to give a precise answer:įirst of all, what do you mean by spoken? Do you want to rank languages by their number of native speakers, or by how many people speak them at all, natively or non-natively? These two approaches produce very different-looking lists. This question isn't as simple as it may seem. What are the most spoken languages in the world? Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

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