There are almost 7,000 distinct languages spoken in the world, and French and English aren’t even close to being the most common.
- Chinese easily rates no. 1, with about 1.2 billion native speakers, the vast majority of whom speak Mandarin
- The second most commonly spoken language is Spanish, with about 400 million native speakers
- English does rate third with about 360 million native speakers
- English is followed by Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Pungabi and German. French rates 14th.
About 200 languages are spoken in Canada, according to the Huffington Post.
