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Bengali ranked at 7th among 100 most spoken languages worldwide The article was based on 22nd edition of Ethnologue, a database covering a majority of the world’s population with detailing approximately 7,111 living languages in existence across the world Bengali has been ranked at 7th position among 100 most spoken languages across the world. In an article published on Saturday, visual-content provider Visual Capitalist ranked Bangla in the top ten of the list with 265 million native and non-native speakers across the globe. The article was based on 22nd edition of Ethnologue, a database covering a majority of the world’s population with detailing approximately 7,111 living languages in existence across the world. Classified under the branch of Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali has 228 million native speakers in the world. English topped the list with over 1.1 billion total speakers. Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and French round out the top five respectively. Urdu was placed at the 11th spot. For the purposes of measurement, the researchers used the ISO 693-3 set of criteria, which accounts for related varieties and dialects—ensuring that linguistics are not the only factor considered in the count of languages. The data also showed 66% of English speakers learned it as a second language. In contrast, only 17% of Mandarin speakers know it as a second language. Spanish comes in strong second for native speakers with 460 million, considering it is well-used across Latin America. Swahili surprisingly was found to have the highest ratio of second-language speakers to total speakers—although it only has 16 million native speakers, this shoots up to 98 million total speakers. Overall, 82% of Swahili speakers know it as a second language. https://www.dhakatribune.com/world/2020/02/17/bengali-ranked-at-7th-among-100-most-spoken-languages-worldwide