The Most Spoken Languages in the World in 2025 [expert research]

Key Takeaways​

Dominance of Mandarin Chinese and Spanish

Mandarin Chinese tops the list with the highest number of native speakers around the world, very closely followed by Spanish.

Both Mandarin Chinese and Spanish have very large speaker bases due to their population sizes and geographical distributions: Mandarin dominates East Asia, while Spanish has a strong presence mainly in Latin America and parts of the USA.

Global Expansion of English

English is not the most spoken language in terms of native speakers, but it does have a strong global presence because it is widely learned and used as a second language.

It is the international lingua franca in business, science, and digital communication, making it a powerful language culturally, economically, and politically.

Diverse Dialects of Arabic

Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam, joining many different Muslim communities worldwide.

It is a significant global language, with a large variety of dialects spoken across the Middle East and North Africa that vary due to historical, cultural, and geographical factors.

Despite the regional variations, the shared Classical and Modern Standard Arabic forms that are used in formal contexts create a common linguistic thread that goes beyond borders.

Examples of the main dialect groups are:

• Egyptian Arabic: primarily spoken in Egypt, this is one of the most widely understood dialects due to Egypt’s prominent media industry. It is often used in TV shows and music, making it recognizable throughout the Arab world.
• Levantine Arabic: spoken in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. It has regional variations but it shares a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility across the Levant.
• Gulf Arabic: predominantly spoken in the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. It has multiple local variants within regions.
• Western Arabic: spoken in North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. It differs significantly from other dialects due to influences from Berber languages and French.
• Iraqi Arabic: spoken primarily in Iraq and parts of Syria. It is influenced by historical languages like Akkadian and Aramaic.
• Sudanese Arabic: spoken in Sudan, this variant has distinctive phonological and grammatical features influenced by local languages.

Linguistic Stability and Saturation

After extensive research, we did not find a linguistic term that could convey a meaning we intended in order to explain a linguistic phenomenon, so we created our own: linguistic saturation.

With this term we want to indicate the circumstance where, like most major languages listed in this dataset, a language reached a saturation point, meaning that the number of its speakers no longer grows.

However, linguistic saturation should not be confused with linguistic death, which occurs when a language stops being acquired and ends up losing its native speakers, or with linguistic stabilization, whose meaning varies a lot depending on its use.

Linguistic saturation, instead, is frequent both in highly monolingual societies and in regions where the language has successfully become the dominant language, indicating that it has a well-established community of speakers.

Saturation, the way we mean it, does not imply that the number of speakers decreases, so we suppose there must be a numeric compensation somehow. We truly hope research can dive further into this interesting topic.

Exceptions of this saturation phenomenon are English, Sindhi, and Punjabi. Their number of speakers is still increasing, due to factors like demographic trends in primary speaking regions and increasing adoption as second language in other parts of the world.

Political, Cultural, and Economical Influence

The data presented here mainly covers Indo-European languages, especially those from the Romance and Indo-Aryan groups, which play crucial roles in several key global economies, especially in Europe and South Asia.

In general, the languages we listed are both politically and culturally influential, with average scores of 62.86 and 69.29 respectively. This shows their importance in world affairs and cultural exchanges, and their ability to shape global policy and cultural norms.

Moreover, there’s a very strong link between how politically influential a language is and how economically and digitally powerful it appears, with average scores of 0.915 and 0.811 respectively.

By these high correlations we can conclude that politically authoritative languages often dominate economic matters and digital communications, which reinforces their global reach.

This connection emphasizes the impact of globalization on language convergence, that is, the fact that languages increasingly borrow terms and structures from one another.

On the one hand, language convergence enhances communication, but on the other hand, it raises concerns about linguistic purity.

If a language is more powerful, it might get special treatment and more attention on digital platforms and economic discussions, which further strengthen its status.

From this data we also confirmed that languages with a rich culture tend to be more visible online, with a strong connection score of 0.867. Honestly, we weren’t surprised by this result, and neither should you!

In fact, cultural richness often guides content creation, which in turn boosts the digital presence of a language, attracting non-native speakers and enthusiasts to online platforms.

The Easier the Language, the Higher the Number of Speakers

Languages that are easier to learn have more people speaking them as a second language. This accessibility helps these languages spread globally, making them popular in schools and among language learners worldwide.

But when it comes to learning, linguistic challenges might appear. Understanding and adapting to different sentence structures can be a significant challenge in language acquisition, affecting the speed and efficiency with which you learn the language.

Some of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn are Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. These languages share similar grammatical structures to English, which makes them more intuitive for English speakers to learn.

Not only do these languages make learning easier due to similar sentence structures, like the syntactical order, but they are also culturally rich, making them attractive for learners.

Cultural Aspect of Language Learning

The rich cultural heritage associated with these languages, including literature, music, and cinema, upgrades the learning experience and attracts more learners.

Most of the languages you have read here, including Italian, are well-known for their cultural and online content, which makes them appealing for students.

There are many available media options that make learning these languages more fun, immersive, and engaging, which, in turn, increases their popularity and attracts learners and users from all over the world.

When we met and spoke about our teaching experiences, we realized we had something in common: most of our students decided to learn Italian because they like the music, the food, or the literature. In general, it’s the culture that attracted them to learning the language.

Cognitive Aspect of Language Learning

Among the cognitive benefits of multilingualism it is important to underline better problem-solving abilities, delay in the onset of age-related cognitive decline, and improved memory.

These advantages further motivate learners to engage with foreign languages, and are particularly compelling when considering the most learned languages in the world, like English, Spanish, or Mandarin Chinese.

For instance, learning languages with complex grammatical structures or unique scripts, such as Mandarin Chinese, can significantly enhance memory and attention to detail.

But also, learning globally-spoken languages like English or Spanish prepares learners for more complex and diverse interactions in different aspects of life, which enriches their cognitive reserves over time.

Professional Aspect of Language Learning

Learning languages that are relevant in trading like Mandarin Chinese and Arabic could be strategically important for economic reasons, especially in business.

As the world’s economy changes, being able to speak these languages can give you competitive advantages in business, diplomacy, and cultural negotiation, especially in those markets that are rapidly growing nowadays.

The Decline of a Language

There are many factors that contribute to the decline of a language.
The main one is, not surprisingly, a reduced use in daily communication, which can occur due to different reasons.

For instance, in bilingual communities, one language might be more used than the other, ending up with substituting for that.

Socio-political reasons also play a crucial role: lack of official status or support and economic migration might lead to language shift and gradual disappearance.

Also, adoption of more dominant languages and/or globalization might open on to language convergence, which is also one of the primary causes of the decline of a language.

International policies, such as those promoting multilingual education, language preservation grants, and diplomatic language choices, can also influence the spread and preservation of languages.

Finally, tourism can have both positive and negative effects.

It encourages language preservation when communities promote their culture to attract tourists, but it can lead to language fading when people prefer global languages like English for better business opportunities.

Growing languages, declining languages

Mandarin is projected to have almost 1.2 billion native speakers by 2050, with a growth rate restricted to 27% due to China’s aging population and decreasing birth rates.

Spanish is expected to have a significant increase of 44% in native speakers by 2050, positioning it ahead of English in terms of growth.

English, while remaining one of the most important languages globally, is facing a decline in the share of the world’s population that speaks it as a native language. However, it continues to rise as a second language, especially in scientific and online contexts.

Hindi has shown substantial growth over the last decade, with an increase in the number of speakers by 64,684,736 between 2011 and 2021, making it one of the fastest-growing languages.