What Is The Most Spoken Language In The World? Some Interesting Facts

English is the Most Spoken Language in the World with 1.46 billion speakers. The 2nd most spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese, Let us discuss.

Have you ever wondered what is the most spoken language in the world? If you don’t know the answer and you guessed English, then you are technically right, but at the same time, you are also wrong. It is Mandarin Chinese, which is the most spoken language in the world. 

How so? You might ask, and the answer is that while English is spoken by more than 1.5 billion people in the world, it has only 375 million, compared to Mandarin, which has 920 million native speakers and 1.1 billion total speakers. If you found this fact interesting, then we have some more interesting facts for you below.

• Now you know what is the most spoken language in the world and the second most, but what is the third? The answer is Spanish, with 500 million native speakers and 600 million total speakers.
• The fourth most spoken language in the world is Hindi, with 344 million native speakers and 600 million total speakers.
• The fifth most spoken language in the world is Arabic, with 310 million native speakers and 430 million total speakers.
• Mandarin is primarily spoken in China, Taiwan, and Singapore, whereas English is primarily spoken in 70 different countries.
• Hindi, on the other hand, is primarily spoken in India and Nepal, whereas Arabic is primarily spoken in 22 different countries.
• An average educated Chinese person can recognize more than 8000 different Hanzi characters of the language.
• English has a large vocabulary of more than 170,000 words and approximately 1000 new words are added to it every year.
• More than 4000 words in Spanish have Arabic origins, due to centuries of Moorish rule in Spain.
• While we all know that English borrows a lot of words from Greek, Latin, and French, it even has words from Hindi, like Shampoo and Bungalow.
• Hindi on the other hand has its roots in Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages in the world.
• Similarly, words like cotton, sugar, and Algebra in English have their roots in Arabic.
• The longest word in English is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and if you have guessed it, it is a disease.
• Mandarin has no alphabets, instead it has logograms, which can be written the same, yet pronounced differently and still understood across all dialects.
• In addition to Sanskrit, Hindi language also borrows words from other languages like Persian (bazaar), Arabic (adab), and even Portuguese (ananas for pineapple).
• In terms of syllables per second, Spanish is one of the fastest-spoken languages in the world.
• Unlike the other spoken languages mentioned here, Arabic is written from right to left.
• Similarly, calligraphy in the Arabic language is a very revered art form, often used in architecture.
• Shakespeare invented more than 1700 different words in the English language and is credited with words like swagger and lonely.
• Even though Mandarin and Cantonese are linguistically related, they are not mutually intelligible.
• Compared to that Hindi and Urdu (the primary language of Pakistan) do not share the same script yet are mutually intelligible.
• The Spanish language also has Latin ancestry, making it a cousin of English, French, and Portuguese.
• Arabic on the other hand is part of the Semitic language family, making it a cousin of Hebrew and Aramaic.