What are mother tongue languages and how many are there? There are approximately about six thousand and five hundred languages spoken all over the world today. The most popular out of those languages is Mandarin Chinese, and around 1,213,000,000 people speak it. Out of these languages, there are twenty-three mother tongues spoken all over the world.
Mother tongue languages
What are mother tongue languages?
Mother tongue is referred to the language a person learns from home. It is the dominant or home language that is spoken by a person and is learned from birth. Mother tongue, often referred to as L1 is the language that a person not only learns to speak from birth but also attaches robust emotional connectivity to it. The native language or mother tongue of a person is the language they have mastered by heart. Any individual understands the linguistic aspects of their mother tongue better than any other language that they might come to learn in the future. Usually, when emotions are heightened, we see any bilingual or multilingual person to revert to their mother tongue and express themselves through it. That is because humans link strong emotional connection to their mother tongue since it is associated with their children and is the first language they learn that acts as an outlet of expression for them.
Its native speaker best speaks any language. Which is why in translation industries, they claim that their translators or interpreters are native speakers. This is because nobody can interpret a language or perform translations than the person who has been actively speaking it since birth.
Following is a list of all mother tongue languages and the number of people who speak those. Click here if you’d like to see our full list of languages.
| Mother Tongue | No. of Native Speakers (in million) | No. of countries the Language is Spoken in |
| Chinese | 1284 | 37 |
| Spanish | 437 | 31 |
| English | 372 | 106 |
| Arabic | 295 | 57 |
| Hindi | 260 | 5 |
| Bengali | 242 | 4 |
| Portuguese | 219 | 13 |
| Russian | 154 | 19 |
| Japanese | 128 | 2 |
| Landha | 119 | 6 |
| Javanese | 84.4 | 3 |
| Korean | 77.2 | 7 |
| German | 76.8 | 27 |
| French | 76.1 | 53 |
| Telugu | 74.2 | 2 |
| Marathi | 71.8 | 1 |
| Turkish | 71.1 | 8 |
| Urdu | 69.1 | 6 |
| Vietnamese | 68.1 | 3 |
| Tamil | 68 | 7 |
| Italian | 63.4 | 13 |
| Persian | 61.7 | 30 |
| Malay Bahasa | 60.8 | 16 |
Boosting cultural exchanges
To boost the cultural exchange and to increase the number of speakers of any particular language, trade is the key. Trade promotes relationships between people belonging to two different cultures and helps spread others’ cultures to new places around the world. New language centers are being built all over the world to promote the native languages of the world and increase linguistic exchange between languages, hence bring people emotionally closer to each other.
It has been advocated over and over again that imposing an official trade language may kill the growth of other languages. But in truth, mother tongues are not just abandoned. So as a result of imposing trade languages, people may grow up to be bilingual or multilingual rather than stump the growth of their native language.
The importance of translation services
Accurate translation services are being used to boost intercultural exchanges and to boost eCommerce all over the world. Translation companies like USA Translate make sure your documents are accurately translated and adapted to the target market (language, culture, customs).
