According to the Ethnologue website, English is the most widely spoken language in the world, with 1.5 billion speakers. Mandarin, or Simplified Chinese, ranks second with 1.2 billion speakers. Hindi ranks third with 611.2 million speakers.
The top 10 also includes Spanish (561.3 million), Standard Arabic (334.9 million), French (333.5 million), Bengali (274.4 million), Portuguese (269.4 million), Indonesian (254.8 million), and Urdu (246 million).
Standard German ranks 12th (133 million), Japanese 13th (126 million), Nigerian Pidgin 14th (121 million), and Egyptian Arabic 15th (118 million).
Six of the top 15 languages in the ranking are predominantly spoken in Asia, including Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Hindi, Bengali, Indonesian, Urdu, and Japanese.
Collectively, these languages reflect the massive populations of China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Japan.
Ukrainian ranks 58th. It is spoken by 30.8 million people.
Romanian ranks 68th. It is considered the native language of 23.2 million people worldwide.
