Here are the 21 most spoken languages in the world in 2021 according to Ethnologue
- English
- Mandarin Chinese
- Hindi
- Spanish
- Standard Arabic
- Bengali
- French
- Russian
- Portuguese
- Urdu
- Indonesian
- Standard German
- Japanese
- Marathi
- Telugu
- Turkish
- Tamil
- Yue Chinese
- Wu Chinese
- Korean
- Vietnamese
The Ethnologue 200 accounts for most of the world's population. Over 88% of people speak one of these languages as their native tongue, and many hundreds of millions more speak them as second languages. This ranking accounts for both, showing the total usage worldwide. https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/ethnologue200
Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (2021). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (24th ed.). SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com
