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This is a list of languages by number of native speakers. Current distribution of human language families. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]
For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
There is debate over the most-used languages on the Internet. A 2009 UNESCO report monitoring the languages of websites for 12 years, from 1996 to 2008, found a steady year-on-year decline in the percentage of webpages in English, from 75 percent in 1998 to 45 percent in 2005. [2]
The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total English-speaking population of the European Union and the United Kingdom combined (2012) is 256,876,220 [70] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [71] i.e. 51%) including 65,478,252 native speakers and 191,397,968 non-native speakers, and would be ranked 2nd if it were included.
Portuguese Speaking World - Countries and Territories where portuguese is spoken - Native Language in Dark Green. The Portuguese-speaking world, also known as the Lusophone World (Mundo Lusófono) or the Lusosphere, comprises the countries and territories in which the Portuguese language is an official, administrative, cultural, or secondary language.
The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. [137] This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu).
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, [1] [2] making it the largest language by number of speakers, the third largest language by number of native speakers and the most widespread language geographically.
The third language (grades 5–8, often Hindi in the non-Hindi states) is the regional language of the state (if the student opted for Hindi as the second language, a foreign language or Sanskrit). An exception is Tamil Nadu , where only Tamil and English are taught.