This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers. However, all such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum.For example, a language is often defined as a set of varieties that are mutually intelligible, but independent national standard languages may be considered to be separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian.Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian and even English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible.While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors describe its mutually un