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Limits RegistryMandarin Chinese has an estimated 940 million or so native speakers, more than any other language in the world, according to Ethnologue's widely used language survey — well ahead of Spanish and English, which typically follow in second and third place among native-speaker counts, though English has far more total speakers when second-language speakers are included.
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Mandarin Chinese has an estimated 940 million or so native speakers, more than any other language in the world, according to Ethnologue's widely used language survey — well ahead of Spanish and English, which typically follow in second and third place among native-speaker counts, though English has far more total speakers when second-language speakers are included.
The greatest estimated number of people who speak a given language as their first (native) language.
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Limits Registry. LR-LANGUAGE-MOST-NATIVE-SPEAKERS. Language with the most native speakers in the world. 2026.