Language · Facts & sources
4 sourced facts about world languages, each with the context behind the number. 4 more are in today's round and appear here after it closes.
Answer6 official languages
They are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish; Arabic was the last one added, in 1973.
Source: Wikipedia: Languages of the United Nations (2024) en.wikipedia.org
AnswerEnglish, about 1,493 million total speakers
English has only about 372 million native speakers, but over 1.1 billion more people speak it as a second language.
Source: Ethnologue, cited in Wikipedia: List of languages by total number of speakers en.wikipedia.org
AnswerMandarin Chinese, about 988 million native speakers
Spanish comes in second with about 487 million native speakers.
Source: Ethnologue, cited in Wikipedia: List of languages by number of native speakers en.wikipedia.org
Answer300 million registered users
The app has kept growing fast since then, more than quadrupling its active users by the mid-2020s.
Source: Wikipedia: Duolingo (2018) en.wikipedia.org