Which are the top 5 most important World languages?

Top five languages in the world are?

• i am trying to find out what the top 5 recognised languages are in the world

• Answer:

  The following list is from George Weber’s article “Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages” in Language Today (Vol. 2, Dec 1997): (number of native speakers in parentheses) Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion) English (330 million) Spanish (300 million) Hindi/Urdu (250 million) Arabic (200 million) Bengali (185 million) Portuguese (160 million) Russian (160 million) Japanese (125 million) German (100 million) Punjabi (90 million) Javanese (80 million) French (75 million) However, in terms of secondary speakers, Weber submits the following list: (number of speakers in parentheses) French (190 million) English (150 million) Russian (125 million) Portuguese (28 million) Arabic (21 million) Spanish (20 million) Chinese (20 million) German (9 million) Japanese (8 million) Thus, if you add the secondary speaker populations to the primary speaker populations, you get the following (and I believe more accurate) list: (number of speakers in parentheses) Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion) English (480 million) Spanish (320 million) Russian (285 million) French (265 million) Hindi/Urdu (250 million) Arabic (221 million) Portuguese (188 million) Bengali (185 million) Japanese (133 million) German (109 million)