Most spoken language in world

tunedout

Hi. I am just wondering what is the most used/spoken language in the world?

Raytown Rocks

Im gonna say mandarin.

seamus

Most used? It's English by a country mile. Go to practically any country in the world and you will encounter things written in English. No other language can really say the saem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

There's a bit of contention in the Mandarin/English debate primarily because it's hard to say what constitutes "use" of a language. I know a little French, having done it for Leaving Cert, but I'm not functionally competent. Likewise I imagine there are a lot of people with a similar level of English but without a proper level of competency.

If you categorise it on the basis of language fluency, then the rates change a lot because far less people would be fluent in English.
The estimates in the above link from 1997 in particular would be way off since it claims 450 million English speakers in the world. That's about the combined populations of all of the countries where English is the official language.

So that figures effectively ignores the number of non-native English speakers.

jigital

The most spoken language may be Mandarin Chinese, but in a global context, it would be English.

HavingCrack

It really depends how you define "used". In terms of number of native/fluent speakers Mandarin is top, Spanish is probably 2nd with English 3rd. In terms of 'global' languages English is in front by a country mile.

Littlehorny

Yeah in terms of numbers its 1. mandarin chinese 2. spanish and 3.english but i would say english is the most spread out.