Which language has the most native speakers in the world?

Counted by mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese comes first, with a first-language community that runs to roughly a billion people across northern and southwestern China and beyond. Two things drive that. One is simply the size of the population it belongs to. The other is a century of language policy: Mandarin was promoted as the national standard and taught throughout the school system, so tens of millions who grew up in regions with their own varieties now speak it natively. It is worth being careful about what Chinese means here, because Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and the rest are not mutually intelligible in speech even though they share a written form; grouping them all as one language inflates the figure, and grouping them separately still leaves Mandarin on top. The picture flips entirely if the question is about total speakers rather than native ones, because English is learned as a second language by a far larger share of the world than any other.

The same Chinese characters can be read aloud in completely different ways depending on which variety the reader speaks.