Here is the top 20: 1 Chinese (Mandarin) 2 English 3 Hindi 4 Spanish 5 Arabic 6 Russian 7 Portuguese 8 Bengali 9 Malay 10 French 11 Japanese 12 German 13 Farsi (Persian) 14 Urdu 15 Punjabi 16 Vietnamese 17 Tamil 18 Wu Sino-Tibetan 19 Javanese 20 Turkish Source: (http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html) Gravity.

Everyone will say that it is chinese and english.

Of course Chinese is the most speak language in the world since the largest population. But if comes to the world language, English is it! English is flooded in science, technology,music...almost all the fields. So, people all over the world are learing English to cpmpete the positions.

Well, but what question are those lists answering? Are those just iigures of native speakers, their first language? For instance if you consider the number of eastern european countries where german is a common second language, the nuber of german speakers is much higher. Or for insance asian countries where french language has remained since colonial days. I would expect to see french much higher on how many people in hte world understand it at least as a second language.

Here is another Top 20 list (from number 6 on the list seems to depend strongly on the underlying statistics): 1 Mandarin 2 Hindi 3 Spanish 4 English 5 Arabic 6 Portuguese 7 Bengali 8 Russian 9 Japanese 10 German 11 Punjabi 12 French 13 Wu Sino-Tibetan 14 Javanese 15 Telugu 16 Marathi 17 Vietnamese 18 Korean 19 Tamil 20 Italian For boarder-crossing communication, of course, the number of native speakers is not that much relevant. Sorted by decreasing number of non-native speakers, the sequence would of course start with English. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers#Top_20