What is the most spoken language?

By native speakers, Mandarin Chinese leads with approximately 920 million, followed by Spanish (~475 million native) and English (~373 million native). However, when counting total speakers (native + non-native), English tops the list at roughly 1.5 billion. English is the global lingua franca of business, science, aviation, and the internet (about 60% of websites are in English). There are approximately 7,168 living languages today, but about 40% are endangered with fewer than 1,000 speakers each. Nearly half the world's population speaks one of just 23 languages as their mother tongue.