Standard Arabic
400M people can hold a conversation in Standard Arabic across 43 countries; official in 26.
Data as of 28 Oct 2026 · ISO 639-3 arb · Glottolog stan1318 · Afro-Asiatic · CLDR 49, Glottolog 5.3, States sheet
Where Standard Arabic is spoken
Share of each country's people who can hold a conversation in it.
Loading map…
Small territories are not drawn at this scale.
Countries
Share of the population and people who can hold a conversation in it, by country.
How this is measured
Most figures are CLDR's estimates of speakers. CLDR lists only each country's larger languages, so where it has no figure a national census or official survey fills in, and the Figure column says which and what it counts. A home-language figure is a floor: more people can speak the language than use it at home.
Family
Where it sits in the Glottolog tree, root to language.
- Afro-Asiatic
- Semitic
- West Semitic
- Central Semitic
- Arabian
- Arabic
- Standard Arabic
Afro-Asiatic: 42 languages, 836M speakers.
Where these numbers come from
- Unicode CLDR territoryInfo (release 49) (Unicode License v3). Country-level language shares, official status and Tier 3 reach (populationPercent is total speakers, first plus second language).
- Glottolog 5.3 (CC BY 4.0). Language names, ISO 639-3 codes, families.
- Database of International and Intranational Linguistic distances (DICL v2), USITC (CC BY 4.0). Country-pair linguistic proximity (loaded, not yet shown in release one).
- States (ISO 3166-2) sheet, MetroAreas workbook (Citizen of Nowhere, own compilation). States, populations and the four language labels per state.
- Natural Earth 1:110m Admin 0 Countries (nvkelso/natural-earth-vector) (Public domain). World outline for the language maps (world-110m.geojson, properties reduced to iso3 and name).
- Country layer of this site (countries.json workbook population, World Bank iso2 and iso3, OWID country-population) (Citizen of Nowhere, own compilation; World Bank CC BY 4.0; OWID CC BY). Country population, iso2 and /countries slug joined onto languages, countries and families (speakers = share x population).
Definitions are on the Method page.