Language & Vocabulary
Where your native language sits among 33 major languages by native speakers, plus its family and status. Mandarin has 918 million, Spanish 475 million, English 380 million.
English belongs to the Indo-European language family. It has approximately 380M native speakers, or 4.7% of the world.
Grew up speaking something other than English:
95%
of the world. 380 million people share your native language, 4.7% of 8.1 billion.
Native speakers
380M
World share
4.7%
Top languages by native speakers
Ethnologue lists about 7,000 living languages. Roughly 40% are endangered, and half of all languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers. Mandarin has the most native speakers; English has the most speakers of any kind, about 1.5 billion, because most of them learned it second.
In context
The 23 languages in this picker cover the native tongue of about 4.4 billion people, more than half the world. The other 6,980 or so languages share the rest, and a language falls silent roughly every few months as its last speakers die. If yours is not in the list, it is almost certainly smaller than any of these, and Norwegian, at 5 million, is already the size of a single large city.
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About this test
Pick your native language. The module reports its native-speaker count from Ethnologue's 27th edition (2024) and a rarity percentile: the share of the world's 8.1 billion people who do not speak it natively. Mandarin has 918 million native speakers, Spanish 475 million, English 380 million, Hindi 344 million.
Rarity is the default for almost everyone. Even Mandarin speakers are rarer than 89% of the world. Norwegian (5 million) and Finnish (5 million) score 99.9. The percentile says how uncommon your mother tongue is, nothing about how useful it is.
What is the most spoken language in the world?
By native speakers, Mandarin Chinese at 918 million (Ethnologue 2024). Counting second-language speakers, English is largest at around 1.5 billion. The module uses native speakers only.
How many languages are there?
Ethnologue lists about 7,100 living languages. Around 40% are endangered, and the top 20 or so account for more than half of humanity by native speaker. The module covers 22 of the largest.
How many people speak English natively?
About 380 million, third after Mandarin and Spanish in Ethnologue 2024. That is 4.7% of the world, so an English native speaker is rarer than about 95% of people on the module's scale.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Language & Vocabulary module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.