The Friday File: Looking only at native speakers, the most spoken language in the world is Chinese with 1.3 billion first-language speakers. A distant second is Spanish with almost 440 million speakers. English is third with 372 million native speakers, and Arabic follows with 295 million. In fifth is Hindi at 260 million, then Bengali at 242 million. Portuguese is 7^th at 219 million. No other language cracks 200 million.