What is the most spoken language in the world by native speakers?

The most spoken language in the world by native speakers is Mandarin Chinese.

Mandarin is the largest branch of the Sinitic language family and is native to hundreds of millions of people, especially across northern, southwestern, and central China. Its wide reach developed partly because northern China’s broad plains made travel and migration easier than in the mountainous south.

Mandarin is not a single uniform accent. It includes many regional varieties, some of which are difficult for one another’s speakers to understand. Standard Mandarin, based largely on the Beijing dialect, became the official language of the People’s Republic of China and is also an official language of Taiwan and Singapore.

A common mix-up is confusing native-speaker rankings with total-speaker rankings. English has more second-language speakers globally, but Mandarin leads when the comparison is based only on first-language speakers. “Chinese” can also refer to several major language varieties, but quiz questions usually use Mandarin as the canonical answer.