English is the lingua franca of the digital age, and those who use English as their second language may outnumber its native speakers by hundreds of millions.?Facts from ?A loss for Words? by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker, March 30, 2015
The mother tongue of more than 3 billion people is one of these twenty in order of their current preponderance:
1. Mandarin Chinese
2. Spanish
3. English
4. Hindi
5. Arabic
6. Portuguese
7. Bengali
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. Javanese
11. German
13. Wu Chinese
14. Korean
15. French
16. Telugu
17. Marathi
18. Turkish
19. Tamil
20. Vietnamese
21. Urdu