Curated playlist
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 in the Southern Hemisphere. It is official in nine countries scattered across…
- Russian languageRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, carried from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to the International Space Station orbiting overhead. It is one of only two languages spoken aboard that station, a practice that…
- 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 reaches speakers in about 50. Yet the most striking fact about it sits in a…
- 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. The Chinese government calls all of these spoken forms dialects of one language. Yet a…
- 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 it climbs to third place, behind only Mandarin and English. Yet the language has no…
- Spanish languageSpanish, called español or castellano, is spoken today by about 519 million people as a native language and roughly 636 million in total. It is the official language of 20 countries and one of the six official languages of the United…
- 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 on Earth. Yet the speakers themselves draw a line that Western linguists draw…
- 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. It carries an endonym, Bahasa Melayu, and a Jawi-script name, بهاس ملايو. It is an Austronesian language native to…
- English languageEnglish began as the speech of the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who crossed into Britain after Roman rule collapsed. From those settlers came two names that endure: Ænglaland and Ænglisc, the country and the tongue. Today that…
- 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 as the third-most-spoken language in the world, behind only English and Mandarin,…