An L1 speaker has the language as a first language, learned from early childhood. An L2 speaker uses it as a second language, learned in addition to their first. Rankings of the world's biggest languages change a lot depending on whether L2 speakers are counted.
Key takeaways
- L1 means first language and L2 means a language learned in addition to it.
- Counting only L1 speakers and counting L1 plus L2 speakers can give very different rankings.
- On our map, English has about 379 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019), yet it is learned by many more people as a second language.
- Always check whether a speaker figure is first-language only before comparing languages.
How L1 and L2 counts work
A first language, or L1, is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within early childhood [1]. A second language, or L2, is a language spoken in addition to the first. It might be a neighbouring language, another language of the speaker's home country, or a foreign language [2]. A person can have more than one L1 if they grew up with two languages from the start [1].
The line between the two is less sharp than it sounds. A person's strongest or most-used language is not always the first one they learned [2]. Even the word native is called imprecise in general use, since it can refer to where a person learned a language, how they identify, how others label them, how well they know it, or how often they use it [1]. A census question that asks for the language first learned at home and still understood will give a different answer from one that asks which language is spoken at home today [2].
This matters for rankings. A language that many people learn later in life, for work, school or trade, gains a large L2 population. A language spoken mostly within one community has mostly L1 speakers. Add the two groups and the list reorders. The homepage section on the most spoken languages mentions that rankings differ for this reason. This page goes one step further: before you compare two figures, check which group they count.
An example from our data
Every speaker figure on a language page names its source and says what it counts. English shows about 379 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Spanish shows about 485 million (Ethnologue, 2023), and Mandarin Chinese shows about 918 million (Ethnologue, 2019). These are approximate and are first-language counts, so they leave out everyone who uses the language as an L2.
Hindi has about 341 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019), while Swahili has about 16 million (Wikidata (unreferenced), 2010). Swahili is widely used as a second language across eastern Africa, so a first-language count says little about how far it is understood. Compare the two figures only with the kind and source in view, and treat them as estimates.
The thing people get wrong
The common mistake is to treat a single "number of speakers" as if it were the same measurement for every language. It is not. One list counts L1 only, another adds L2, and sources disagree by millions even for the same language because they count in different years and define a speaker differently. A language with few L1 speakers can be important to millions more. The map therefore shows the kind of figure next to each number rather than ranking languages by a single total.
L1 vs L2
| L1 speakers | L2 speakers | |
|---|---|---|
| Learned | From birth or early childhood | In addition to a first language |
| Typical setting | Home and family | School, work, trade or migration |
| Effect on rankings | Used in first-language lists | Added in total-speaker lists |
Frequently asked questions
What does L1 mean?
L1 means first language: the language a person was exposed to from birth or early childhood.
Why do different lists rank languages differently?
Some count only first-language speakers and some count second-language speakers too. The same language can sit at very different places depending on which is used.
Does the map count second-language speakers?
Not as a total. Many speaker figures on the map are first-language only, and each page names the kind and the source.
Sources
- First language, Wikipedia.
- Second language, Wikipedia.
- Every figure from our own map is worked out from the datasets on the data sources page (checked against Glottolog and Glottography, retrieved 13 October 2026).