In the group of most spoken languages in the world, after the front trio and French, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese and Indonesian follow. Calculations for the number of total speakers are always debatable, and therefore the hierarchy of languages varies depending on the sources, but relying on the Etnologue website there will be around 270 million who speak Portuguese.
French, according to new OIF estimates, will be spoken by 396 million people, with a substantial increase since 2022 given the inclusion (new methodology) of children aged 6 to 9 who attend school in countries where French is the official language of instruction.
The report was presented in the city of Quebec, in the Canadian province of the same name, a bastion of the French language in North America, but the great growth in the number of speakers comes from Africa, from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, the giant that was once called Zaire.
In addition to growth due to Africa’s thriving demographics, French is also growing through learning outside the Francophone space, and in this regard it is second only to English. It is estimated that 90 million people speak French even though they do not belong to the French-speaking world, according to a recent article published in the newspaper Figarofrom which I sought the essentials of the numbers mentioned above.
Portuguese is also growing, mainly thanks to Africa. The vast majority of speakers of Portuguese as their mother tongue continue to be from Brazil, a country with more than 210 million inhabitants, but Angola has the greatest potential for growth in speakers. United Nations demographic projections point to 500 million inhabitants of Portuguese-speaking countries by 2100, which would mean a doubling of the number of speakers.
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