Curated category
Lingua francas
- Portuguese languagePortuguese carries roughly 267 million native speakers, making it the fifth-most spoken native language on earth and the most widely spoken language anywhere…
- Russian languageRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, carried from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to the International Space Station orbiting…
- French languageFrench is a Romance language with about 310 million speakers, of which roughly 74 million are native speakers. It is an official language in 26 countries and…
- Chinese languageRoughly 1.39 billion people, about 17% of everyone alive, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. That single fact hides a complication.
- HindiHindi is the fourth-most-spoken first language in the world, trailing only Mandarin, Spanish, and English. Count it together with its mirror twin Urdu, and…
- Spanish languageSpanish, called español or castellano, is spoken today by about 519 million people as a native language and roughly 636 million in total.
- ArabicArabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic family, and roughly 380 million people speak it. That figure makes it the fifth-most spoken language…
- Malay languageMalay is spoken as a first language by about 80 million people, and as a first or second language by close to 300 million.
- English languageEnglish began as the speech of the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who crossed into Britain after Roman rule collapsed.
- Hindustani languageHindustani is the language that 855 million people speak, yet many of them insist they are speaking something else. As of 2025, Hindi and Urdu together rank…