Infographic illustration depicting the 10 most spoken languages around the world. Colours indicate language origin. Solid circles indicates native speakers and shaded areas indicate non-native speakers. The most spoken language is English with 1,121 million people but for many people it is spoken as a second language. This contrasts with Mandarin Chinese which, with 1,117 million speakers, comes close to English but has a much higher percentage who are native speakers. Data from Ethnologue.