There are five languages that stand out among the most popular second languages.
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1. English
English is the world’s most popular second language, with people across all five continents speaking it – French is the only other language to be spoken so widely in a geographical sense.
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Some 1.5 billion people across the globe are able to speak English, but only 400 million of these individuals would call English their first language, meaning it’s been adopted as a second language by more than one billion people.
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2. Hindi
Hindi is the world’s second most popular second language, with 295 million speakers adopting it on top of their mother tongue.
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Hindi is the primary language of Bollywood, with some 1.2 billion people in the target market for films produced in Hindi, presenting the industry with a huge global opportunity.
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3. French
At numéro trois on our list is French, which boasts approximately 200 million second language speakers.
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French is of course the official second language of Canada, and is one of the most widely taught languages in schools across the globe. This is partly because learning French can be a good starting point for picking up other Romance languages, including Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, as many of their words share common roots.
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4. Mandarin
The number of people speaking Mandarin Chinese as a second language varies worldwide, but it’s actually the most widely spoken language of all. It’s the main second language in Australia and it’s one of the most popular languages for English online language learners to focus on.
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5. Latin American languages
Spanish and Portuguese, the two main languages of Latin America, are widely adopted second languages too. For example, in Brazil where Portuguese is the official language, Spanish – which has some 450 million speakers globally – is the most common second language; in Latin America’s Spanish-speaking countries, the situation is vice versa.
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