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Below is a List of languages by number of native speakers.^[1]

Over half the world's population speaks the 15 most used native languages. They are listed here. They are from the Swedish Nationalencyklopedin (2007, 2010).

The distinction between language and dialect is often not clear. Some mutually intelligible versions have been unified.^[2] These include Indonesian and Malay; Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian. It does not include standard Hindi and Urdu. Hindustani has been divided here into the sociolinguistic units of Hindi and Urdu, but at least 100 million speakers of some Hindi dialects are not counted below.

Rank	Language	Native speakers	% of world population	Mainly spoken in	Language family
1	Mandarin	955,000,000	14.4%	East Asia	Sino-Tibetan
2	Spanish	386,000,000	6.15%	South America, North America, Spain, Western Sahara, Philippines, Central Africa	Indo-European
3	English	360,000,000	5.43%	northern North America, northern Europe, parts of Africa, Australia/New Zealand	Indo-European
4	Hindi	310,000,000	4.70%	South Asia	Indo-European
5	Arabic	295,000,000	4.43%	Middle East, North Africa	Afro-Asiatic
6	Portuguese	215,000,000	3.27%	eastern South America, southern Africa, Portugal	Indo-European
7	Bengali	205,000,000	3.11%	South Asia	Indo-European
8	Russian	155,000,000	2.33%	East Europe, northern Asia	Indo-European
9	Japanese	125,000,000	1.90%	Japan	Japanese
10	Punjabi	102,000,000	1.44%	South Asia	Indo-European
11	German	89,000,000	1.39%	Central Europe	Indo-European
12	Javanese	82,000,000	1.25%	Indonesia	Austronesian
13	Wu	80,000,000	1.20%	China	Sino-Tibetan
14	Malay/Indonesian	77,000,000	1.16%	Southeast Asia	Austronesian
15	Telugu	76,000,000	1.15%	India	Dravidian

Related pages

List of endangered languages

References

↑ Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin. Asterisks mark the 2010 estimates for the top dozen languages.
↑ "Mutually intelligible": each side can understand the other side.