
The main problem with most of the articles available in internet showing ranking of the most spoken or powerful languages and especially the ones pretending to show the incoming trends is that the studies/criteria behind to support the statistics are often highly questionable or not clear. In this article, we firstly explain the criteria and source of data used for the analysis one by one and then we combine them in order to make a final list of languages worth to be learnt.
Source of information: 2018 Edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, which is based in the United States. Figures presented below are as of August 2018.
- Mandarin Chinese – approx. 909 million native speakers (+12M since 2016)
- Spanish – approx. 442 million native speakers (+15M since 2016)
- English – approx. 378 million native speakers (+39M since 2016)
- Arabic – approx. 315 million native speakers (+48M since 2016)
- Hindi – approx. 260 million native speakers (+0M since 2016)
Source of information: 2018 Edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, which is based in the United States. Figures presented below are as of August 2018.
- English – approx. 744 million L2 speakers (+141M since 2016)
- Hindi – approx. 274 million L2 speakers (+154M since 2016)
- French – approx. 208 million L2 speakers (+55M since 2016)
- Mandarin Chinese – approx. 198 million L2 speakers (+4M since 2016)
- Russian – approx. 110 million L2 speakers (+80M since 2016)
Generally, the total number of speakers is not fully reliable as it adds estimates from different dates and uncited sources. We took into account only the information and data from the 2018 Edition of Ethnologue. Figures presented below are as of August 2018.
- English – approx. 1.12 billion total speakers (+180M since 2016).
- Mandarin Chinese – approx. 1.10 billion total speakers (+16M since 2016).
- Hindi – approx. 534 million total speakers (+154M since 2016)
- Spanish – approx. 512 million total speakers (-6M since 2016)
Source of information: W3Techs (as of 25 August 2018) – Usage of content languages for websites
The figures from the W3Techs study are based on the one million most visited websites and language is identified using only the home page of the sites. As a consequence, the figures below show a significantly higher percentage for many languages (especially for English) as compared to the figures for all websites.
- English – 53%
- German – 6,2%
- Russian – 6,1%
- Spanish – 5,0%
- French – 4,2%
- Japanese – 3,7%
- Portuguese – 2,9%
- Italian – 2,5%
- Persian – 2,0%
- Chinese – 1,8%
Source of information: Wikipedia page “List of official languages by country and territory”.
- English – 59 countries in total (incl. 24 in Africa, 16 in Americas, 4 in Asia, 3 in Europe and 12 in Oceania)
- French – 29 countries in total (incl. 21 in Africa, 2 in Americas, 5 in Europe and 1 in Oceania)
- Arabic – 26 countries in total (incl. 13 in Africa and 13 in Asia)
- Spanish – 21 countries in total (incl. 1 in Africa, 19 in Americas and 1 in Europe)
- Portuguese – 9 countries in total (incl. 6 in Africa, 1 in Americas, 1 in Europe and 1 in Oceania)
- German – 6 countries in total (incl. 6 in Europe)
- Italian – 4 countries in total (incl. 4 in Europe)
- Russian – 4 countries in total (incl. 2 in Asia and 2 in Europe)
- Chinese – 3 countries in total (incl. 3 in Asia)
Conclusion: what are likely the most powerful languages?
We combined all the information described above related to all considered criteria for this analysis in order to draw conclusions and show our languages ranking.