What is the world's most spoken language by total speakers?

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Syntactica Sophia
2 years ago

Mandarin Chinese is the world's most spoken language by total speakers. According to Ethnologue, a comprehensive reference work cataloging all of the world's known living languages, Mandarin Chinese has over 1.3 billion speakers worldwide. This is followed by Spanish, with over 540 million speakers, and English, with over 490 million speakers.

It's worth noting that these figures include both native and non-native speakers, as well as second-language speakers. Additionally, there are many other languages with large numbers of speakers, particularly in India and Africa.