To see you off before the summer, we want to leave you with a series of questions and answers on the things people most often wonder about languages. Which is the most spoken language in the world? And the easiest one? The questions can be many. We’ve tried to give the best and most up-to-date answers, bearing in mind too how quickly some of these situations change.

If there is something we haven’t covered, do write to us: it will be an interesting starting point for expanding this article.
Now let’s begin….

Which is the most spoken language in the world?

It’s the most common question and, at the same time, the easiest one: Mandarin Chinese.

Also called “Standard Chinese”, it’s the official language of the People’s Republic of China, of Taiwan and of Singapore: altogether over 955 million native speakers, on top of course of everyone who studies it for work reasons.
It’s so widespread that it remains the “most spoken language in the world” whether you consider a ranking that counts only native speakers, or one that also includes those who study it as a second or third language.

This distinction becomes important, however, when determining second place.

If we consider only native speakers, second place goes to Spanish or, more correctly, Castilian, which counts around 405 million people who learn it from the cradle, spread across more than 30 different nations. Third place instead goes to English, with over 360 million native speakers.

The situation reverses if we instead consider both native speakers and those who speak a given language as a second language. In this case English gains a position and moves up to second place, coming close to Chinese’s levels.

Which is the most studied language in the world?

Here too the podium firmly stays in the hands of the three languages we’ve already seen:

• English is without doubt the most studied language internationally. It’s spoken in nations that are influential from a cultural and commercial point of view, it has established itself as the lingua franca for business, and we’re sure none of you doubt this top spot.
• The second most studied language, instead, is Spanish. Thanks to its wide diffusion, its rapid expansion even in the United States, but also to the economic and social development of the giants of Latin America (with the sole exception of Brazil). As Argentina, Chile and others open up more and more to trade with the rest of the world, studying Spanish also becomes a more interesting investment. Of course these are countries with unstable growth, where rapid expansions alternate with equally rapid contractions, but it’s undeniable that they are countries increasingly making their presence felt on the world stage.
• In third place we again find Chinese: the language of the world’s second superpower, studied more and more both in Asia and in Western countries.

Even though many were surprised when, last year, the ranking we’re referring to came out, in fourth place instead we find Italian.
Certainly a language that doesn’t carry much weight in terms of number of native speakers, but which has appeal for a large number of foreign students. How is that possible?

Perhaps the figure isn’t so astonishing if you consider a number of economic and cultural factors.

Italy represents an important trading partner and a powerful pole of attraction for many countries in Central and Eastern Europe: Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Albania and others in the same area are countries where Italian is widely studied, often more than French or Spanish.

On the American continent, on the other hand, from north to south a great many descendants of Italian immigrants choose to study their language of origin in schools or in the many institutes of Italian culture.

Then there’s the Catholic Church: many members of the clergy study Italian and use it as a lingua franca much more than Latin itself, which remains the official language mainly for written documents.
Let’s add Italian cultural influence in the broad sense: fashion, music (especially classical and opera), food, literature, and it’s no surprise that the world counts so many enthusiasts who decide to study the language of Dante.

How many languages are there in the world?

As we wrote in an old article dedicated precisely to the number of known languages, the languages currently spoken in the world are between 6,000 and 7,000, distributed across the 196 independent states recognised today.

Working out the exact number isn’t easy. On the one hand, it isn’t always possible to draw a clear line between two dialect variants and two genuinely different languages (think, for instance, of the countless variants of Mandarin Chinese). On the other, languages are alive: they are born and they die as human social groups evolve.

In recent years the trend has been for the number of spoken languages to decrease: there are some cultural minorities that are disappearing or that are in any case seeing their distinctiveness diminish compared with the predominant communities in the state they live in, sometimes spontaneously, other times through a kind of forced assimilation.

The Babel of human languages is, in short, growing simpler, albeit slowly (6-7 languages a year). Worrying as this linguistic impoverishment is, language is such a living, changeable thing that the trend is hard to reverse. You cannot keep a language alive artificially once the young people of a community no longer recognise themselves in it and would rather adopt languages with a wider reach.

Which is the easiest language for an Italian to learn?

Certainly another Romance language: French, Spanish, Portuguese. The similarity of a great many words and of the syntactic and grammatical structures means that a few months are enough to communicate acceptably, even if a deeper knowledge takes a longer period.

Right after that probably comes English. Even though the syntactic structures and phonemes are often different, it’s a relatively close language and above all it’s a language you often hear in Italy across pretty much every field. Even those who have never seriously studied it probably know some words or expressions that recur in films, in pop songs, in public debate, and so never really start from zero.

One last question…

Then there’s one last question, perhaps the most frequent among those we happen to be asked. It’s a topic that, in our view, should always be tackled case by case, but if in the meantime you want some initial guidance you can find here our tips on the most useful foreign language for work.

See you soon!