“Hindi” is also used as a catchall term to cover numerous dialects and sub-dialects. More troubling is the fact that what we refer to simply as “Chinese” is actually a whole family of languages conveniently lumped into a single category. What constitutes a language or a dialect is hotly contested stuff. One small caveat: Assigning hard data, in the form of “X million native speakers,” to any of these languages is practically impossible. We can say with some confidence that Mandarin, English, Spanish and Arabic will make an appearance (and roughly in what order), but there are some surprises, too! Would you have guessed that Bengali is in the top 10 most spoken languages? Determining what are the most spoken languages in the world is a more difficult task than you might imagine.
