A world of languages

For a very long time I have been wondering what the most spoken language in the world might be and how this would relate to the other top spoken language across the globe but I was too lazy to do any research. Well, here is my answer nicely packaged in an infogram thanks to Alberto Lucas Lopez who created this interesting breakdown for the South China Morning Post. The world has truly become a village.

Around the world there are a total of 7,102 known languages, of this gargantuan amount twenty-three remain popular enough to be considered the most spoken languages of the world.

These 23 languages are considered the mother tongue for more than 50 million people and the native tongue for more than 4.1 billion people. To put this into perspective there are currently around 7.2 billion people living on planet earth.

The circle represents the 4.1 billion people around the world that speak one of the 23 most spoken languages. The graphic further breaks down these numbers by the amount of people that speak a given language according to country.