Some of the most widely spoken languages of the world by population are Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese.
English
Chinese (Mandarin)
Hindi
Spanish
French
Arabic
Bengali
Russian
Portuguese
Indonesian
English is one of the most widely spoken and written languages worldwide. The impact of the British Empire and continued influence of the British Commonwealth in Asia, North America, South America and Africa also contributed towards making English a dominant language in many parts of the globe.
So-called language families are varieties of the above or other major languages. Some of the largest language families by language count are Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, and Afro-Asia.
Over 6900 languages are currently spoken in the world. They belong to 94 different language families. Based on the population of the speakers, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan are the two largest language families, with over 4.6 billion speakers between them.
English and Mandarin are the two most widely spoken languages in these families; English is classified as Indo-European and Mandarin Chinese as Sino-Tibetan.
Indo-European languages are the prevailing languages across Europe, North and South America. Under the Romance languages of the Indo-European group, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian have a wide relevance in the culture and literature of different countries.
