Language forms the backbone of communal existence. If you’ve ever traveled to a place where you don’t speak the language, it doesn’t take long to discover this.
Where is the nearest bathroom? How much does this cost? From the most rudimentary questions of human survival to complex religious and philosophical texts, language is one of the greatest tools society can offer for us to communicate with one another and understand the world around us.
Countless dialects exist across the globe, some closely related to one another and others completely foreign. Find out which language is the most commonly spoken, and which new one might be easiest for you to learn.
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Online language tool Babbel reports that English is the most spoken language in the world, with a number of speakers totaling more than 1.4 billion in 2022, according to Statistic & Data. This combines both native and non-native speakers.
If you shift the definition strictly to native speakers, Babbel reports that Chinese – a designation including Mandarin along with a number of other dialects is the winning language, with 1.3 billion native speakers. Mandarin itself is the second most spoken language in the world.
Statistics & Data reports that the top 10 most spoken languages in the world, in order, are:
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This is a subjective question. Different languages operate on varied sets of characters and certain languages are easier or harder to learn based on your mother tongue.
For native English speakers, Babbel reports that Norwegian is one of the easiest languages to learn. Like English, it is a Germanic tongue, therefore sharing some vocabulary. The pronunciation and grammar are also straightforward.
Other languages that might be easier for English speakers include:
For Spanish speakers, the easiest languages to learn are other romance languages, language software company Rosetta Stone reports. That includes French, Italian, Portuguese as well as a number of others.
This is again, a subjective question. For English speakers, Babbel reports that Mandarin Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn, given it does not operate off the Latin alphabet and the tonal pronunciation poses a challenge to many native English speakers.
Rosetta Stone reports that Mandarin is also one of the most difficult languages for Spanish speakers to learn.
Berlitz, another online language tool, reports that Hungarian is the most difficult language for English speakers to pick up given its complicated grammar and pronunciation.
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The first language spoken by humans is a subject of some debate.
The Times of India reports that the world’s oldest language is Sanskrit, widely considered to be one of the most ancient languages in the world, and the origin point for many modern languages.
Sanskrit has been spoken since 5,000 years before Christ, but in its modern iteration is less of a form of communication and more of a language used for worship.
Translation service, The Spanish Group, however reports that recent evidence suggests the language of Tamil might actually be older, dating back to 350 BC and possibly serving as the blueprint for Latin and Greek.
There are over 7,000 languages in the world. Ethnologue, an online publication that provides data on the languages of the world, reports that there are 7,151 living languages.
Just 23 of those languages account for half of the world’s populations speaking patterns though.
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