English Is the Third Most Widely Spoken Language in the World

If all of the languages spoken in the world were proportionally represented by 100 people at a party, 5 would speak English.

With 918 million native speakers, Mandarin Chinese comes first, followed by Spanish, English, Hindi, and Bengali:

However, 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 if we take into account not only native speakers but also all those people who can speak English as a foreign language too.

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