What is the most spoken language according to the number of individual speakers?

W: OK, everyone. Who knows what the world’s most spoken language is?
M: Well, it’s an ambiguous question. If you just look at how many individual speakers there are around the world, then the answer is Mandarin Chinese with 836 million speakers. English was second until a few years ago, but it has since been overtaken by Hindi with 333 million speakers and Spanish with 332 million speakers. Now English is after Spanish with 322 million speakers in South America.
W: Oh yes, South America. I didn’t think of that.
M: Yes, it’s easy to forget. You can look at the question in a different way if you look at the number of countries that use English. English is a massive 115, ahead of French, Arabic and Spanish with 35, 24 and 20 countries respectively. English has different statuses around the world. Core countries are where English has a full official status like England, the US and Australia. In outer core countries English has some official status as in India, and then there are fringe countries such as Japan and the UAE where it’s used a lot in business and tourism. A more important list is the world’s most influential languages. This was compiled by weighing 6 factors which were the number of primary speakers, the number of secondary speakers, the number and population of the countries where the languages are used, the number of major fields using the languages internationally, the economic power of countries using the languages and socio - literary prestige. And the list shows the following in order of most influential: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Hindi.
W: How up to date are these figures?
M: Fairly. They came out just last year. But the picture is changing very rapidly in terms of influential languages. There’re certain large countries which are about to emerge on the world stage and their economies are starting to influence the world balance of power.