What is the world's most widely spoken first language?

Mandarin Chinese, with around 940 million native speakers - comfortably ahead of Spanish and then English. Count second-language speakers and the order inverts completely: English gets to something like a billion and a half, the overwhelming majority of whom did not grow up with it.

Chinese complicates the question. What is often called a set of dialects is really a family of languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and others are not mutually intelligible, and speakers of different ones cannot simply converse. They are held together by a shared writing system, which encodes meaning rather than sound, so two people who cannot understand a word of each other's speech can read the same page.

There are around 7,000 languages alive today and roughly half are expected to be gone by the end of the century. About forty per cent of the world's population speak one of just eight of them, and a language typically dies when parents stop passing it on because another one offers their children better prospects - which is a decision, not an accident.