List of languages by total number of speakers
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. Some languages, such as Chinese and Arabic, cover several mutually unintelligible varieties and are sometimes considered single languages and sometimes language families. Conversely, colloquial registers of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible, and are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani, instead of two separate languages. 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. There is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. For example, English has about 370 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers. There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes  speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be under-reported in favour of a national language. Top languages by population. Section::::"Ethnologue" (2022, 25th edition). The following languages are listed as having 40 million or more total speakers in the 2022 edition of "Ethnologue". Entries identified by "Ethnologue" as macrolanguages (such as Arabic, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese, encompassing all their respective varieties) are not included in this section. CIA, 2020. According to the CIA, the 10 most-spoken languages (L1 + L2) in 2020 were: List of languages by total number of speakers This