The ranking of the most spoken languages in the world in 2024

The most spoken languages in the world reflect the complex intersection of economic, demographic and historical factors.
The ranking drawn up by Ethnologue offers an in-depth look at the distribution of the most influential languages globally.
The ranking takes into account non-native dialects and reflects not only historical, but also migratory and economic dynamics.
The rise of English as a global language, for example, can be attributed to Britain's colonial past and its lasting influence on world business and diplomacy.
Likewise, Mandarin owes its pre-eminence to China's numerically significant population and China's growing economic influence.
Also of note is the phenomenon of the languages of former colonial powers, such as English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, maintaining a global resonance thanks to historical and commercial connections created during the colonial era.
In summary, the ranking of the most spoken languages reflects the complexity of global relationships and how historical, demographic and economic factors contribute to shaping the global linguistic landscape.
read also Best degrees and universities for finding a job, the ranking What are the most spoken languages in the world? At the top of this list, English dominates undisputedly, with the extraordinary figure of 1.5 billion speakers.
Originating from the United Kingdom, English has evolved over the centuries to become the international language in world business and politics.
In second place is Mandarin, the most widespread variant of Chinese, with an impressive number of 1.1 billion speakers.
Originating in northern China, Mandarin has acquired a global reach, becoming the predominant language in China and Taiwan, while also spreading to many communities in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.
The complete ranking includes: Position Language No.
of speakers (2023) 1 English 1,500,000,000 2 Mandarin 1,100,000,000 3 Hindi 609,500,000 4 Spanish 559,100,000 5 French 309,800,000 6 Standard Arabic 274,000,000 7 Bengali 27 2,800,000 8 Portuguese 263,600,000 9 Russian 255,000,000 10 Urdu 231,700,000 11 Indonesian 199,100,000 12 German 133,200,000 What are the 10 most studied languages in the world? The most studied languages in the world can vary based on several factors, including economic, cultural and geographical reasons.
However, some languages are generally considered more popular or more 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, reports more or less the same results, except for the Spanish language , which is in second position, and for Chinese, which is in tenth.
read also Which foreign languages to study to earn more money What is the most difficult language in the world? Determining the most difficult language in the world is complex and subjective, as learning difficulty depends on many factors, including native language, similarity to other known languages, grammatical structure, writing system, and more.
However, some languages are commonly considered “complex”.
One of the simplest languages for Italian speakers is Spanish, because it has a vocabulary and phonetics typical of Romance languages, such as Italian.
At the same time, there are languages that are very different from Italian in terms of elements such as alphabet, syntax, phonetics and phonology.
In general, the languages considered most difficult are: Mandarin: the complexity of the Chinese writing system, with thousands of characters, and the tone of the language make Mandarin a real challenge; Arabic: Right-to-left writing, the presence of 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 the presence of grammatical cases can pose challenges for those who are not accustomed to these linguistic features.