Ethnologue list of most spoken languages Totally Explained

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This list gives the most spoken languages in the world according to the Ethnologue, a widely cited reference for languages around the world. The Ethnologue is sometimes criticised for using out-of-date data, but there's no available fully authoritative source for numbers of first language speakers which uses the same criteria for counting in each case. Another tendency of the Ethnologue is to separate what many others (sometimes including speakers of the varieties) consider to be single languages: see for example comments in this article on English and German. This list, based on the 15th edition (2005), aims to count first language speakers only (though there are some difficulties with this criterion, as with any other, caused by issues such as bilingualism, differing perceptions of cultural identity and the questions of when language varieties are to be considered different languages or dialects). It also counts macrolanguages, as defined by the Ethnologue, such that Chinese and Arabic are counted as united languages rather than by the varieties also listed, such as Mandarin Chinese or Egyptian Arabic. The year bracketed next to the number of speakers is the year given in the Ethnologue for when the data was taken (for the country with most speakers).

Ranking by number of native speakers	Language	Number of speakers	Where spoken natively by more than 5% of the population (in order of population, down to 20,000 speakers)	Comments
1	Chinese	1,205m (1999)	People's Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan), Malaysia, Singapore
2	Spanish	322.3m (1995)	Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, United States, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Panama, Belize, Andorra, Gibraltar
3	English	309.4m (1984)	United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore, Bermuda, Northern Mariana Islands, Bahamas, Guam, Cayman Islands
4	Arabic	206m (1998)	Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Mauritania, Palestinian Territories, Israel, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Chad, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Djibouti, Western Sahara
5	Hindi	180.8m (1991) (Khariboli dialect only)	India, Fiji
6	Portuguese	177.5m (1998)	Brazil, Portugal
7	Bengali	171.1m (1994)	Bangladesh, India
8	Russian	145m (2000)	Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Israel, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, Turkmenistan
9	Japanese	122.4m (1985)	Japan
10	Standard German	95.4m (1994)	Germany, Austria, Switzerland
11	Javanese	75.5m (1989)	Indonesia, Suriname
12	Telugu	69.7m (1997)	India
13	Marathi	68m (1997)	India
14	Vietnamese	67.4m (1999)	Vietnam
15	Korean	67m (1986)	South Korea, North Korea
16	Tamil	66m (1997)	India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia
17	French	64.9m	France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, French Guiana, French Polynesia	Figure doesn't include significant populations in countries such as Haiti and Mauritius, where speakers are said to speak creoles. 14th edition (2000) gives 77m total.
18	Italian	61.5m	Italy, San Marino
19	Western Panjabi	60.8m (2000)	Pakistan
20	Urdu	60.5m (1997)	India, Pakistan

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