67 / 67
🇬🇧 English English Owned by its second-language speakers Germanic1.5B 🇨🇳 Chinese (simplified) 简体中文 Not one language Sino-Tibetan1.2B 🇮🇳 Hindi हिन्दी Half of a language with two names Indo-Iranian610M 🇪🇸 Spanish Español Second by native speakers Romance600M 🇸🇦 Arabic العربية Two languages in one name Afro-Asiatic370M 🇫🇷 French Français Spelled for a pronunciation it abandoned Romance310M 🇲🇾 Malay Bahasa Melayu A thousand years of trade Austronesian290M 🇧🇩 Bengali বাংলা The language people died for Indo-Iranian280M 🇵🇹 Portuguese Português The infinitive that conjugates Romance260M 🇷🇺 Russian Русский Stress that will not tell you where it is Slavic255M 🇵🇰 Urdu اردو The other half of the same language Indo-Iranian230M 🇧🇷 Portuguese (Brazil) Português brasileiro The one with all the speakers Romance215M 🇮🇩 Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia A national language chosen on purpose Austronesian200M 🇹🇿 Swahili Kiswahili Nouns in eighteen classes Niger-Congo200M 🇩🇪 German Deutsch Close relative, long homework Germanic135M 🇯🇵 Japanese 日本語 Three writing systems at once Japonic125M 🇮🇳 Telugu తెలుగు The Italian of the East Dravidian96M 🇹🇷 Turkish Türkçe One word, one sentence Turkic90M 🇱🇰 Tamil தமிழ் Still speaking a classical language Dravidian87M 🇻🇳 Vietnamese Tiếng Việt Latin letters, six tones Austroasiatic86M 🇵🇭 Tagalog Tagalog The verb points at the important thing Austronesian83M 🇰🇷 Korean 한국어 The alphabet somebody designed Koreanic82M 🇮🇷 Persian فارسی Indo-European in Arabic script Indo-Iranian78M 🇮🇹 Italian Italiano The closest thing to Latin still spoken Romance67M 🇹🇭 Thai ภาษาไทย No spaces, five tones Kra-Dai61M 🇵🇱 Polish Polski Consonants in formation Slavic40M 🇺🇦 Ukrainian Українська Not a dialect of anything Slavic40M 🇮🇳 Malayalam മലയാളം A palindrome with a lot of consonants Dravidian37M 🇹🇼 Chinese (traditional) 繁體中文 The characters that were never cut Sino-Tibetan25M 🇳🇱 Dutch Nederlands Three genders that are really two Germanic25M 🇷🇴 Romanian Română Latin that stayed east Romance25M 🇱🇰 Sinhala සිංහල Round letters, palm-leaf reasons Indo-Iranian22M 🇿🇦 Afrikaans Afrikaans Germanic, stripped to the bone Germanic17M 🇰🇿 Kazakh Қазақ тілі Changing alphabets, again Turkic17M 🇬🇷 Greek Ελληνικά Three thousand years of paperwork Greek13M 🇭🇺 Hungarian Magyar Eighteen cases and no relatives nearby Uralic13M 🇸🇪 Swedish Svenska The sound nobody else has Germanic13M 🇨🇿 Czech Čeština Sentences with no vowels Slavic11M 🇧🇦 Bosnian Bosanski One language, three names Slavic10M 🇦🇩 Catalan Català Not a dialect of anything Romance10M 🇮🇱 Hebrew עברית The one language that came back Afro-Asiatic9M 🇧🇬 Bulgarian Български The Slavic language that dropped the cases Slavic8M 🇷🇸 Serbian Српски Two alphabets, same language Slavic8M 🇦🇲 Armenian Հայերեն Its own alphabet, its own branch Armenian7M 🇭🇷 Croatian Hrvatski The purist of the three Slavic7M 🇦🇱 Albanian Shqip An only child Albanian6M 🇩🇰 Danish Dansk Written clearly, spoken in cursive Germanic6M 🇫🇮 Finnish Suomi Fifteen cases and no future Uralic5M 🇳🇴 Norwegian Norsk Two ways to write it, no way to speak it wrong Germanic5M 🇸🇰 Slovak Slovenčina The one everyone else can follow Slavic5M 🇬🇪 Georgian ქართული Eight consonants in a row Kartvelian4M 🇱🇹 Lithuanian Lietuvių kalba The closest thing to the ancestor Balto-Slavic3M 🇲🇩 Moldovan Moldovenească Romanian with a passport Romance2M ⭐ Esperanto Esperanto Built on purpose, in 1887 Esperanto2M 🇪🇸 Galician Galego The mother of Portuguese Romance2M 🇱🇻 Latvian Latviešu valoda One of the last two Baltics Balto-Slavic2M 🇲🇰 Macedonian Македонски Three kinds of the Slavic2M 🇸🇮 Slovenian Slovenščina Still counting in twos Slavic2M 🏴 Scots Scots The sister nobody counts Germanic2M 🇪🇸 Basque Euskara Older than everything around it Isolates1M 🇪🇪 Estonian Eesti keel Three lengths of everything Uralic1M 🇲🇽 Yucatec Maya Maya t'aan Made of, not shaped like Mayan800k 🇺🇸 American Sign Language ASL Not English on the hands Sign languages500k 🇮🇸 Icelandic Íslenska Old Norse, still running Germanic400k 🇬🇧 British Sign Language BSL The other side of the same wall Sign languages150k 🇹🇿 Hadza Hadzane Clicks, and no way to write them down Hadza1k 🇦🇺 Kuuk Thaayorre Kuuk Thaayorre No left, no right Pama-Nyungan0k
Speaker counts from Ethnologue. Word coverage counted over the OpenSubtitles corpus. Weeks of study are the US Foreign Service Institute estimate for a full-time English-speaking learner, which is an average from one institute rather than a law of nature. Where a claim is disputed, the card says so instead of repeating it.