The World’s Top 10 Most Spoken Languages

In today’s increasingly globalized world, having a shared means of communication—or an international language, rather—is more important than ever.

With over 1.1 billion speakers worldwide, English is currently the closest we’ve come to a lingua franca, a common language that connects people from different backgrounds.

Could Mandarin Chinese one day catch up? While English and Mandarin Chinese come close when looking at their total number of speakers, English has a wider geographical distribution—it’s classified as an official language in 67 different countries worldwide. In contrast, Mandarin Chinese is recognized as an official language in just five regions.