The world's 38 biggest languages,
and the design of how they're written

Explore all 38

Ethnologue ranks individual languages, not "macrolanguages", so Arabic and Chinese appear as several separate varieties — Modern Standard, Egyptian, Levantine and Sudanese Arabic; Mandarin, Cantonese and Wu Chinese^[1,2]. Counts include second-language speakers, which is why English, spoken natively by 372 million, leads with 1.49 billion^[2].

Languages

3850M+ speakers each

Scripts

187 basic kinds

Language families

12Indo-European is the largest

Speaker counts, added

8.1Bpeople counted once per language

First language vs second language

For 9 of the 38, more people speak the language as a second language than as a first: English, Modern Standard Arabic, French, Indonesian, Urdu, Nigerian Pidgin, Swahili, Tagalog (Filipino), Thai. These are the bridge languages of trade, school and government^[2].

English is the biggest of these bridge languages, and most of its speakers learned it as a second language. If you’re one of them, our free English level test places you on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2 and gives you a certificate for your CV and LinkedIn.

Added together, their speaker counts reach 8.1 billion, because many people speak two or three of these languages and are counted once for each^[2].

“How are you?” in 38 languages

The same question, written in each language's own script — and spoken. Press play to hear all of them one after another, or pick one to stop the stage; each language page compares it side by side with any other and cites its phrasebook source.

Seven kinds of script

Writing systems differ in what one symbol stands for. The 18 scripts on this page use seven basic designs; see chunking for why units like Hangul's syllable blocks are easier to read.

• HxpgLatin alphabet · Hxpg

  Alphabet

  One letter for each consonant and vowel.

  Latin alphabet · Cyrillic alphabet

• سلامArabic script · salām

  Abjad (consonants)

  Letters write consonants; short vowels are optional marks.

  Arabic script · Persian alphabet (Perso-Arabic) · Nastaliq (Urdu and Shahmukhi)

• नमस्तेDevanagari · namaste

  Abugida (syllabic)

  Each consonant carries a vowel, changed by marks attached to it.

  Devanagari · Bengali–Assamese script · Gujarati script · Telugu script · Kannada script · Tamil script · Thai script · Ge'ez (Ethiopic) script · Javanese script (Aksara Jawa)

• 你好Chinese characters · nǐ hǎo

  Logographic

  Each character writes a word or meaningful part of one.

  Chinese characters (simplified) · Chinese characters (traditional)

• 日本語Japanese · nihongo

  Mixed system

  Several writing systems are used together in one sentence.

  Japanese (kanji, hiragana, katakana)

• 한글Hangul · hangeul

  Featural alphabet

  Letter shapes encode how the sound is made.

  Hangul

Ten ways to write 0–9

The digits 0–9 used worldwide began in India, where they developed out of Brahmi numerals; they reached the Islamic world through writers such as al-Khwarizmi and Europe through Fibonacci's Liber abaci of 1202^[14,15]. Many scripts still keep their own forms of the same ten digits.

What scripts teach product owners

Writing systems are the oldest interfaces humans have designed, refined over centuries by millions of readers. Six lessons carry straight into apps — and into the conventions users bring with them.

1. StoredकिDrawnकि

   Store meaning, draw appearance

   In Devanagari the vowel sign ि is drawn before its consonant but spoken after it. Unicode stores text in spoken order and leaves drawing to the font — a clean split between data and presentation that every design system should copy^[16].

   See it in Hindi →
2. 1202 مرحبا← reads right to leftnumbers left to right →

   Direction is not one-way

   Arabic, Persian and Urdu run right to left, but numbers inside them run left to right, so one line can change direction twice. Interfaces built for these languages must handle both^[17].

   See it in Arabic →
3. Englishi→ITurkishi→İ

   Case is a local rule

   Uppercasing 'i' gives 'İ' in Turkish, not 'I'. Most of the world's scripts have no case at all. Never assume a transformation works the same way in every language^[18].

   See it in Turkish →
4. สบายดีไหมwellgood?

   Spaces are optional

   Thai and traditional Javanese do not separate words with spaces, so line-breaking needs a dictionary. Truncating text at the nearest space breaks in these languages^[19,20].

   See it in Thai →
5. ا

   Tools shape forms

   The reed pen's square dot became the unit of Arabic calligraphy, and round South Indian letters are often linked to writing on palm leaves. Every interface is shaped by the medium it is made for, too^[21,22].

   See it in Tamil →
6. ㅎㅏㄴ한

   A system beats a set of one-offs

   Hangul builds every syllable from 24 letters by rule, and Ge'ez makes seven vowel forms of each consonant by regular marks. Readers learn the pattern once — the same reason consistent components make apps easier to learn^[13,23].

   See it in Korean →

The full table

Sources

1. Ethnologue — What are the top 200 most spoken languages? (2026)
2. Wikipedia — List of languages by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2026 figures, retrieved October 2026)
3. Omniglot — Proto-Sinaitic script
4. Omniglot — Phoenician alphabet
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alphabet (writing)
6. Omniglot — Aramaic alphabet
7. Omniglot — Nabataean alphabet
8. Omniglot — Ancient South Arabian script
9. Omniglot — Ge'ez (Ethiopic) script
10. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Brahmi
11. Omniglot — Pallava script
12. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Chinese languages
13. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Hangul
14. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Hindu-Arabic numerals
15. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Liber abaci (1202)
16. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 12: South and Central Asia-I (Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada)
17. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 9: Middle East-I (Arabic)
18. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 7: Europe-I (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic)
19. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 16: Southeast Asia-I (Thai)
20. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 17: Southeast Asia-II (Javanese, Philippine scripts, Kawi)
21. Asian Art Museum, San Francisco — The history of Islamic calligraphy
22. Wikipedia — Ola leaf (palm-leaf writing and rounded scripts)
23. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 19: Africa (Ethiopic)

Checked October 25, 2026. Each language page lists the sources for its own history, phrases and script. Found an error? Tell us.