English Is a Native Language Just for a Third of All English Speakers
Even though you’re reading this article in English, there’s a good chance it might not be your mother tongue. Of the billion-strong English speakers in the world, only 33% consider it their native language.
According to Ethnologue, a database covering a majority of the world’s population, there are about 7,111 living languages in existence today. Here are the language origins of the 100 most spoken languages, as defined by the Ethnologue database:
A detailed visualization from WordTips illustrates the 100 most spoken languages in the world, the number of native speakers for each language, and the origin tree that each language has branched out from.
With over 1.1 billion total speakers – or roughly 15% of the global population – English comes as the most widely spoken language in the world. It is followed by Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and French:
However, English is the third most widely spoken language in the world when considering native speakers:
With 918 million native speakers, Mandarin Chinese comes first, followed by Spanish, English, Hindi, and Bengali.