The world’s most spoken languages in 2025: from the dominance of English to the allure of Mandarin, this ranking reveals the global linguistic landscape.
What are the most spoken languages in the world in 2025? This is a question that may seem obvious at first glance, but which can actually be a bit surprising when you read the data that is circulating.
There are currently around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but the exact number may vary slightly depending on the criteria used to define what constitutes a language distinct from a dialect.
Furthermore, the most spoken languages in the world can be evaluated both by the number of native speakers (those who speak it as a first language) and by the total number of speakers (including non-native speakers).
There are also a whole series of geographical, historical and cultural factors to take into account, just think of the centuries marked by the race for colonization.
So let’s see what the ranking of the most spoken languages in the world in 2025 is, taking into account both native speakers and the total number of speakers.
Ranking of the most spoken languages in the world in 2025
For over fifteen years, the Ethnologue 200 has been the most in-depth and reliable study to measure the diffusion of a language in the world.
Let’s see in detail - according to the 2024 update - which would be the 20 most spoken languages in the world by total number of speakers.
| Position | Language | No. of speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | English | 1,515,000,000 |
| 2 | Mandarin | 1,140,000,000 |
| 3 | Hindi | 608,800,000 |
| 4 | Spanish | 559,500,000 |
| 5 | Standard Arabic | 332,500,000 |
| 5 | French | 311,600,000 |
| 7 | Bengali | 272,200,000 |
| 8 | Portuguese | 263,800,000 |
| 9 | Russian | 255,400,000 |
| 10 | Urdu | 237,900,000 |
| 11 | Indonesian | 199,100,000 |
| 12 | German | 133,900,000 |
| 13 | Japanese | 123,500,000 |
| 14 | Nigerian Pidgin | 120,700,000 |
| 15 | Egyptian Arabic | 104,400,000 |
| 16 | Marathi | 99,300,000 |
| 17 | Telugu | 95,800,000 |
| 18 | Turkish | 90,100,000 |
| 19 | Hausa | 88,200,000 |
| 20 | Tamil | 86,700,000 |
At the top of this list is English, with a whopping 1.5 billion speakers. Originating in the United Kingdom, English has evolved over the centuries to become the world’s international language of business and politics.
In second place is Mandarin, the most widely spoken form of Chinese, with a whopping 1.1 billion speakers. Originating in Northern China, Mandarin has gained global reach, becoming the predominant language in China and Taiwan, and has also spread to many communities in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.
However, this special top 20 does not include Italian, a language that is essentially only spoken in Italy and in some countries where in the past there was a large emigration of ours.
This is instead the ranking of the 10 most spoken languages in the world by native speakers.
- Mandarin Chinese - 920 million
- Spanish - 475 million
- English - 373 million
- Hindi - 344 million
- Arabic - 310 million
- Bengali - 240 million
- Portuguese - 232 million
- Russian - 154 million
- Japanese 125 million
- Javanese - 95 million
As you can see, this ranking is quite different from the previous one, with Mandarin Chinese being the most spoken language in the world by native speakers, with Spanish also surpassing English.
What are the 10 most studied languages in the world?
The most studied languages in the world can vary based on a variety of factors, including economic, cultural, and geographic reasons. However, some languages are generally considered most popular or most studied globally.
According to The Washington Post, the most studied languages in the world are:
- English (with 1.5 billion students)
- French (with 82 million students)
- Chinese (with 30 million students)
- Spanish and German (tied with 14.5 million students)
- Italian (with 8 million students)
- Japanese (with 3 million students)
The ranking of Duolingo, an app for learning the basics of a foreign language, shows more or less the same results, except for Spanish, which is in second place, and Chinese, which is in tenth place.
What is the most difficult language in the world?
Determining the most difficult language in the world is complex and subjective, since the difficulty of learning depends on many factors, including the native language, similarity to other known languages, grammatical structure, writing system, and more. However, some languages are commonly considered “complex”.
In general, the languages considered most difficult are:
- Mandarin: the complexity of the Chinese writing system, with thousands of characters, and the tonality of the language make Mandarin a real challenge;
- Arabic: Right-to-left writing, guttural sounds, and the absence of written vowels in some words can make Arabic a challenging language;
- Japanese: The combination of three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) and the complexity of polite forms can make Japanese difficult;
- Russian: The Cyrillic alphabet and grammatical cases can be challenging for those who are not accustomed to these linguistic features.
Original article published on Money.it Italy. Original title: La classifica delle lingue più parlate al mondo nel 2025
