4 ms·

Chinese is #1 according to Wikipedia.

• Freak_NL 9y ago
  That list comes with a fair warning about its reliability at the top though¹. English is indisputably the largest second language (L2) spoken in the world, and is vying for the position of most spoken language with Mandarin Chinese. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
  • bpicolo 9y ago
    "For example, English has about 400 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers." So depending on how you choose you metric, English wins overall
• hnaccount91 9y ago
  Yeah, but it's all inside one region isn't it? Comprising of China (obv), HK/Macau, Taiwan and parts of Vietnam maybe (not sure). Like everyone likes citing this fact to me as though it is mind bending, but if that language is never going to spread out, then what's the point of counting it as a "widely" spoken language.