The world's most spoken languages

English remains the world’s most spoken language by total number of speakers, according to data compiled by Visual Capitalist.

The language is spoken by about 1.5 billion people globally, with non-native speakers accounting for 74 per cent of that total.

Mandarin Chinese follows with approximately 1.2 billion speakers, the majority of whom are native speakers.

Hindi ranks third with about 600 million speakers, reflecting India’s linguistic diversity, while Spanish comes fourth with 558 million speakers worldwide.

The data highlights the global spread of English as a second language and the strong regional concentration of Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish among native-speaking populations.