Europe’s top ten most commonly spoken languages according to their number of native speakers has been revealed – with a surprising tongue taking the number one spot.

The list reveals that English is Europe‘s joint fourth most spoken. Our mother tongue shares fourth place with Turkish – with both languages having around 70 million native speakers.

French and German both have more native speakers than English does, with 100 million and 80 million respectively. However, Italian and Spanish have less, with 69 million and 45 million.

Ukrainian shares joint sixth place with Spanish. Polish is next with 40 million speakers – and Romanian is bottom of the top ten, with 23 million native speakers.

This still leaves us with a few options for first place. You won’t be surprised to hear isn’t Welsh or Cornish.

And the fact it isn’t Portuguese or Dutch probably won’t come as a shock either. So, which language is it?

  

The answer, according to New York-based organization Best Diplomats, is *drum roll please*… Russian. The East Slavic language is spoken in a country of 144 million people that spans Eastern Europe and North Asia and is the largest in the world by area.

And it turns out Vladimir Putin shares his mother tongue with around 120 million other native speakers. However, when it comes to total speakers overall, the language picture looks radically different.

In fact, the top four is completely reversed.

It probably won’t surprise many that, according to berlitz.com, English is the league heard most often around the continent – with 260 million speakers in total. French and Geman take second and third place, with 210 million and 170 million total speakers respectively.

Russian then comes fourth, with 160 million. Italian, with 82 million speakers, is fifth.