South America is a rich melting pot of different mother tongues, with a reported 1,500 languages spoken across its 14 countries upon first European contact in the 15th century.

Even today, Spanish is only just the frontrunner, with around 214,265,000 speakers in areas including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia and Peru.

Portuguese is the second most spoken, with 211,754,600 speakers mainly across Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Venezuela as of 2020, according to the Ethnologue database.

After the top two, there’s a steep decline in the number of people speaking other languages in the top 10 list – with Quechua, an indigenous tongue that originated in Peru counting 7,735,620 speakers in South America, concentrated in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Columbia.

Quechua knocks English to fourth place on the list, with the widely accepted universal language boasting around 6,925,850 speakers on the continent – mainly in the Falkland Islands, Guyana and Columbia.

It is followed by Guarani, one of the official languages of Paraguay, and Talian, a Venetian dialect most commonly spoken in Brazil.

The seventh spot is taken by Hunsrik, also spoken in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina and derived from the West German dialect of immigrants from the Hunsruck region, and the eighth by Aymara – which has only a little over 1,000,000 speakers in North America.

Ninth and tenth place are somewhat surprising entries, though made less so when compared with their variants higher up in the ranking. 

German has 1,285,800 speakers in South America across countries including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Peru – owing to the settlement of German immigrants to the continent between the 18th and 20th century.

And Italian has 1,259,900 speakers in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela. This is also largely due to the arrival of Italian immigrants after World War 2.

Meanwhile, the prominence of Spanish, Portuguese and English has a darker history – the colonisation of the continent by the Spanish Empire between the 14th and 18th centuries and the arrival of Portuguese settlers from the 16th century onwards.

The same can be said of English – with Guyana only becoming independent of the UK in 1966 and a presence still in place in the Falkland Islands.