List of languages by total number of speakers

[2] Conversely, colloquial registers of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible, and are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani.

Such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum.

[4] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.

[6] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing several varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese.

The World Factbook, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), estimates the ten most spoken languages (L1 + L2) in 2022 as follows:[8]

Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world .