Chinese is the top natively-spoken language in the world

According to Ethnologue, there are approximately 1.15 billion native speakers of Chinese globally. Chinese is a macrolanguage which consists of several languages and dialects, including Mandarin. Just over 900 million people in the world speak Mandarin.

For a wonderful visual of the global language breakdown, see A World of Languagesinfographic.

Immersion By the Numbers