◀ Floored

Most Spoken Languages in the World Quiz

How well do you know the most spoken languages in the world? Floored turns the ranking into a building: floor 1 is the top of the list. We name a floor, you guess what's on it, and the lift rides to whatever you picked so you know to go higher or lower.

▶ Play this quiz
Free, no sign-up · 5 lists, a few minutes

How it works

You get a few guesses per floor. Land it on your first guess for 10 points; a near miss still scores. After the languages round, four more lists from the same topic keep the ride going.

Show the full ranking (25)
  1. English 1.49B speakers
    It is an official language in 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories.
  2. Mandarin 1.18B speakers
    Most Mandarin varieties have four tones, plus a neutral tone on unstressed syllables.
  3. Hindi 611M speakers
    Spoken Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible in everyday conversation.
  4. Spanish 561M speakers
    It arose in the medieval Kingdom of Castile and is also called Castilian.
  5. Arabic 335M speakers
    Its standard form has almost no native speakers; Arabic speakers learn it in school.
  6. French 334M speakers
    About half of all French speakers live in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean.
  7. Bengali 274M speakers
    UNESCO made 21 February International Mother Language Day to honour the Bengali Language Movement.
  8. Portuguese 269M speakers
    Colonial contact gave it many African and Amerind words, especially names of animals and plants.
  9. Indonesian 255M speakers
    It is a standardized variety of Malay, very close to the Malay used in Malaysia.
  10. Urdu 246M speakers
    It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan.
  11. Russian 210M speakers
    It is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station.
  12. German 133M speakers
    German capitalizes all nouns, a rule almost unique among modern languages.
  13. Japanese 126M speakers
    Written Japanese mixes kanji with two kana scripts, hiragana and katakana.
  14. Nigerian Pidgin 121M speakers
    It is also known simply as Pidgin, Broken or Naija.
  15. Egyptian Arabic 118M speakers
    Egyptian films and music make it understood across most of the Arab world.
  16. Marathi 99M speakers
    It is the official language of Maharashtra, the state that includes Mumbai.
  17. Vietnamese 97M speakers
    It is written in a Latin-based alphabet; Chinese-based Chu Nom characters were used historically.
  18. Telugu 96M speakers
    Because its words end in vowels, it has been called 'the Italian of the East'.
  19. Swahili 95M speakers
    About 40% of its vocabulary comes from Arabic, including the name Swahili itself.
  20. Hausa 94M speakers
    Besides the Latin alphabet, it is written in an Arabic-based script called Ajami.
  21. Turkish 94M speakers
    In 1928 Turkey replaced the Perso-Arabic script with a Latin alphabet.
  22. Punjabi 90M speakers
    It is written in the Shahmukhi script in Pakistan and in Gurmukhi in India.
  23. Tagalog 87M speakers
    Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, is a standardized form of Tagalog.
  24. Tamil 86M speakers
    It has been attested since around 300 BCE, and India named it a classical language in 2004.
  25. Cantonese 86M speakers
    It is the main spoken language of Hong Kong.

Source: Ethnologue (2026), via Wikipedia: List of languages by total number of speakers · as of 2026

More quizzes

Highest mountains on Earth · Longest rivers in the world · Largest US states by area · Most populous US states · All quizzes ▸

A new ride every day

Floored is a free daily ranking game: five lists, five target floors, same puzzle for everyone. Play today's ride ▸