Statistics website Statista has just published a ranking of the 10 most spoken languages ​​in the world in 2022 among more than 7,000 languages ​​on the planet. English surprisingly comes first. France ranks fifth.

Shakespeare and Mandarin are mostly up front. Based on estimates from the dedicated Ethnologist website, Statista compiled on Monday, February 20th, a ranking of the most spoken languages ​​on the planet. Unsurprisingly, the British and Mandarin Chinese took first and second place on the podium, respectively. These are the people with the most speakers, i.e. people who use their mother tongue or second language, in other words idioms are learned after the mother tongue.

Thus, English takes the lion’s share with 1.452 billion speakers, followed by Mandarin which is spoken by 1.12 billion people. For its part, spoken by 602 million speakers, Hindi, India’s official language alongside English, takes third place.

France is in fifth position

Spanish and its 548 million practitioners are the fourth most spoken language on the planet, far ahead of French. With 274 million speakers, Molière’s language closes the top 5, tied with modern standard Arabic.

They are both followed by Bengalis. The official language of Bangladesh, also the mother tongue of a large portion of the population in India, is spoken by 272 million speakers. Russian (258 million), Portuguese (258 million) and Urdu (231 million), the official languages ​​of Pakistan which are also spoken in northern India, finally close out the rankings. For the record, India has 22 official languages.

© Statistics

In addition to these ten most spoken languages, more than 7,100 dialects are currently spoken on the planet. However, only 23 of them are practiced by more than half of the world’s population. Nearly 3,000 are also considered endangered, according to the Ethnologue website.