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Top 10 Most Spoken Languages in the European Union

Can you name the languages with the most total speakers in the EU?
Data from languageknowledge.eu (adjusted for the UK's exclusion)
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Quizzer6794
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Last updated: February 1, 2020
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First submittedJanuary 16, 2018
Times taken3,035
Average score90.0%
Rating4.90
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Speakers
%
Language
104,950,488
23.6%
English
111,441,771
25.0%
German
89,609,553
20.1%
French
71,475,409
16.1%
Italian
61,424,235
13.8%
Spanish
Speakers
%
Language
42,115,251
9.46%
Polish
24,604,362
5.53%
Dutch
24,089,897
5.41%
Romanian
19,314,538
4.34%
Russian
13,673,617
3.07%
Czech
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7 Comments
+2
Level 85
Jan 15, 2018
Some of those numbers seem low. Poland has a population of 38 million, how can there be only third of that who speak Polish?
+2
Level 80
Jan 16, 2018
I checked the source.

1) The percentages you use are for all ages and all speakers (native+learned)

2) The absolute numbers don`t match with the percentages. The EU has 512.000.000 inhabitants. Thus, 33% are roughly 169.000.000, 22,4% are 115.000.000 and so on. For Polish, it would be nearly 44.000.000 speakers.

+1
Level 50
May 18, 2018
Interesting how Russian is on the list. I guess it's widely spoken in parts of Eastern Europe, though, so makes sense.
+1
Level 66
Feb 1, 2020
Data adjusted for the exclusion of the UK (and % fixed)
+2
Level 83
Apr 10, 2023
I'm surprised Portuguese isn't on this list, even though Portugal itself has a small population
+2
Level 56
Aug 6, 2024
Great quiz! I'm surprised languages like Arabic are nowhere to be found. Or even some regional languages. I bet if Low German had been considered a different language, it would be on here.
+1
Level 52
Sep 5, 2025
To be honest I don't think it would make it on the list as the language has been on the decline for ages and almost all speakers of Low German/Saxon dialect would also be included in the statistics for German and Dutch respectively as these are the languages of administration and education. The numbers on the wikipedia page mention something like 300,000 native speakers only