The world’s most popular languages, by number of native speakers:
- Chinese, 937 million
- English, 335 million
- Spanish, 332 million
- Hindi/Urdu, 291 million
- Arabic, 193 million
- Bengali, 189 million
- Malay/Indonesian, 176 million
- Portuguese, 170 million
- Russian, 165 million
- Japanese, 125 million
“The great thing about human language,” wrote Lewis Thomas, “is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.”