The numbers: Native speakers of top 10 languages

A look at the number of native speakers of the world’s top ten languages

Last updated: September 15, 2018 | 21:25

By Noorhan Barakat, Staff Reporter

1 MIN READ

Chinese (Mandarin) 1,917,000,000

Spanish 406,000,000

English 335,000,000

Hindi 260,000,000

Arabic 223,000,000

Portuguese 202,000,000

Bengali 193,000,000

Russian 162,000,000

Japanese 122,000,000

Javanese 84,300,000

Source: Ethnologue: Languages of the World 17th edition (Ethnologue is a comprehensive reference work cataloguing all of the world’s known living languages, since 1951.)

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