Did you know that out of a total of over 7,000 languages spoken in over 220 countries, only 200 languages are both spoken and written and that only 23 languages are spoken by more than half of the world’s population?
This significant gap can be explained, according to the magazine Maxisciences, by the decrease in the number of speakers, which leads to the gradual disappearance of languages. So, according to Unesco, a language disappears every two weeks.
Among the five mother tongues that prevail in the world, thus rank, according to the scientific publication, Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic.
The Arabic language is also positioned in sixth position of the most spoken languages across the world behind English (1268 billion speakers), Mandarin Chinese (1.012 billion), Hindi (637 million), Spanish (538 millions) and French, the language with which Arabic is neck and neck in this ranking. Indeed, Arabic is spoken by 274 million people in the world against 277 million for French. In addition, in France, the Arabic language is the second most spoken language with more than 4 million speakers.
To complete this Top 10 of the most widely spoken languages in the world, we find behind the Arabic language, Bengali (265 million speakers), Russian (258 million), Portuguese (252 million) and finally, Indonesian (200 millions).
