Which language has the most native speakers?

Mandarin Chinese, with around 940 million - well ahead of Spanish and then English. Count second-language speakers and the order inverts completely: English reaches something like a billion and a half, the large majority of whom did not grow up with it, which makes it the most widely spoken language and the first language of relatively few of its users.

The Chinese figure hides a complication. What is often called a group of dialects is really a family of languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu and others are not mutually intelligible, and speakers of different ones cannot converse. They are held together by a writing system that encodes meaning rather than sound, so the same page can be read aloud incomprehensibly differently and understood identically.

The shape of the future is already visible in the numbers. Around 7,000 languages are spoken today and roughly half are expected to be gone within a century, while about 40 per cent of the world speaks one of just eight. The growth languages are not the obvious ones either - Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese and above all Swahili and the major Nigerian languages are where the demographic weight is heading.