English Remains The World’s Most-Spoken Language

Language plays a central role in shaping global communication, culture, and economic exchange. While some languages dominate due to large native-speaking populations, others achieve global reach through widespread adoption as a second language.

This infographic, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, compares the native and non-native usage of the world’s most spoken languages in 2025, using data from Ethnologue.

The World’s Most Spoken First and Second Languages

English is the most spoken language with approximately 1.53 billion speakers worldwide.

However, just 390 million people speak English as their first language, meaning nearly 75% of English speakers use it as a second language, making it the dominant global lingua franca across industries and professions.

The table below shows native and non-native speaker counts for the world’s most spoken languages in 2025:

In total, about 18.8% of the world’s population speaks English, but only a quarter of those are native speakers.

Mandarin Chinese ranks second with roughly 1.18 billion speakers.

In contrast to English, Mandarin is primarily spoken as a first language, with more than 83% of its speakers being native.

Hindi and Spanish follow as the next most spoken languages worldwide. Hindi has around 609 million speakers, split more evenly between native and non-native usage due to India’s multilingual population.

Spanish stands out as one of the most widely spoken native languages globally, with nearly 87% of its speakers using it as their first language. Spoken Spanish is concentrated across Spain, Latin America, and parts of the United States.

If you enjoyed today’s post, explore more language and culture insights on Voronoi, including The Most Used Languages on the Internet.