Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 8th of August 2018 to The Sounding Line.

The following infographic, from Alberto Lucas Lopez, reveals the number and location of the native speakers of the 23 most common languages around the world. The graphic reveals that just 23 languages are spoken by more than 50 million people around the world and that those 23 languages are the first language of 4.1 billion people, more than half of the global population.

With nearly 1.2 billion native speakers, ‘Chinese’ is by far the most common first language in the world. It is worth noting that in this graphic ‘Chinese’ is referring to several non-mutually intelligible languages and dialects such as Mandarin and Cantonese. After ‘Chinese’ the most common first languages are Spanish, English, and Arabic.

While ‘Chinese’ is the leading first language, English is the world’s leading second language. English is being learned by roughly 1.5 billion people and is spoken in 110 countries around the world, the most of any language.

To see the fastest growing regions of the world, click here.

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