10 Most Spoken Languages

English and Mandarin Chinese are the most spoken languages and are both spoken by over 1.1B people, as shown in the horizontal stacked bar chart. The mix of native and non-native speakers varies greatly across the 10 most spoken languages. While only 1/3 of English speakers are native, 82% of those who speak Mandarin Chinese are native speakers. The data are from Ethnologue.

10 Most Spoken Languages in a Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart

How I Made this 10 Most Spoken Languages Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart

The data on the 10 most spoken languages that is used to create the chart is presented below:

Here's how I made the horizontal stacked bar chart:

create a horizontal stacked bar chart in PowerPoint
copy the data on the 10 most spoken languages from Ethnologue into the Mekko Graphics Data Editor
use the Switch Bars and Series button to treat spreadsheet columns as series and rows as bars
show percentages in segment labels and format to remove the parentheses
format the bar totals to have the M as units
hide the y axis and x axis line and adjust the y axis maximum
reduce bar gaps to make bars wider
adjust the internal chart margins
hide the percentages in the smaller segments and in Standard Arabic
change the color of the Standard Arabic segment to indicate that the non-native speaker data is not available