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Human languages ranked by their number of native speakers are as follows. All such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. For example, a language is often defined as a set of mutually intelligible varieties, but independent national standard languages may be considered separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian. Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian and English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible. While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties.

There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be underreported in favour of a national language.

Top languages by population

Ethnologue (2024)

The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese.

CIA World Factbook (2018 estimates)

According to the CIA World Factbook, the most-spoken first languages in 2018 were:

See also

• List of languages by total number of speakers
• List of sign languages by number of native signers
• List of language families (with number of speakers)
• List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official language
• Number of languages by country
• Languages used on the Internet
• List of ISO 639-3 codes
• Lists of languages
• List of languages by number of speakers in Europe
• Global language system
• Linguistic diversity index
• World language

References

1. ^ Paolillo, John C.; Das, Anupam (31 March 2006). "Evaluating language statistics: the Ethnologue and beyond" (PDF). UNESCO Institute of Statistics. pp. 3–5. Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 January 2017. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
2. Chambers, J.K.; Trudgill, Peter (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-59646-6.
3. Kaye, Alan S.; Rosenhouse, Judith (1997). "Arabic Dialects and Maltese". In Hetzron, Robert (ed.). The Semitic Languages. Routledge. pp. 263–311. ISBN 978-0-415-05767-7.
4. Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
5. Norman, Jerry (2003). "The Chinese dialects: phonology". In Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.). The Sino-Tibetan languages. Routledge. pp. 72–83. ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1.
6. Crystal, David (1988). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 286–287. ISBN 978-0-521-26438-9.
7. ^ Statistics, in Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2024). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (27th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
8. ^ "The World Factbook. People and Society. Languages". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. 29 November 2023. Retrieved 30 November 2023.

• Lists of languages