The table below depicts data on the number of speakers among six languages. Overall, Chinese appears as the most dominant language, followed by English. Regarding the figure for non-native speakers, however, English is the most popular among its users.
As evident from the data in the table, Mandarin has an outstanding number of native speakers in comparison with the rest, which was 900 million. Hindi, English and Spanish all have approximately 350 million users, while that of Arabic and Portuguese only slightly surpass the 200 million mark.
On the other hand, despite having a humble amount of native speakers, English is by far the most prominent language for non-native users, which has 603 million speakers. Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese have a total of just over 400 million users, which breaks down to 190, 120, 70, 24, and 10 million respectively.
Despite having significantly less non-native speakers compared to English, Chinese is still the most widely spoken language in the world, at 1090 millions users. English is not far behind in terms of popularity, the language has almost 950 millions speakers. Hindi’s and Spanish’s figures are both in the 400-500 million range, with Hindi being the more popular one with 490 millions speakers. Arabic and Portuguese are the least used languages, which only have 230 and 213 millions speakers in total respectively.