“The world is small”, or so they say, but while that may be true in a figurative sense, the world is of course very big and complex.  So too is the answer of “what is the most spoken language in the world?”

6,767,805,208 – that was the estimated global population at the end of 2009 according to studies by Miniwatts Marketing Group. Thanks to Wikipedia (whether you trust mass user-generated content or not) we know, roughly, the approximate numbers of native speakers from the world’s languages.

According to Wikipedia and a few other sources, the most spoken langage in the world is Mandarin Chinese, with 845 million native speakers. The second and third most spoken languages are Spanish and English, with around 329 and 328 million respectively.

Of course, we could think of other categories and the top ranked languages. What is the result, for example, if we want to know which is the most spoken language on the Internet?  The world wide web’s population is currently around 1.8 billion – that’s nearly a third of everyone on the planet! Wikipedia, this time quoting a Global reach study from 2004, says that most Internet users speak the English language as a native or secondary language – but English still only accounts for less than half of all the Internet’s content.

After English, Chinese is the second most-used language on the Internet, with Spanish (including the European and Latin American variants, among others) a close third. This was also confirmed in research findings by Byte Level published in 2005, which revealed that English-speaking web users are a minority on the Internet – with less than 30% of the world’s Internet users being native-English speakers.

And what’s the most used language for writing web pages? A study on the presence of Romance languages on the internet, published by the Latin Union in collaboration with FUNREDES, showed that as of November 2007, 45% of all web pages were written in English, 4.41% in French, 2.66% in Italian, 1.39% in Portuguese, 0.28% in Romanian and 5.9% in German.

You probably clicked onto this page perhaps thinking there might have be only one “most spoken language  in the world” and I did, too.  However, what is plainly obvious is that internet has distorted the concentration of languages throughout the world and changed how language is used – both for personal and business use.