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Italian surpasses French and is the fourth most studied language in the world

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The Italian overtook the Frenchman. The top three in the ranking are English, Spanish and Mandarin

Italian is the fourth most studied language in the world. It is what reveals one andstudy carried out by the linguistics organization SIL International, based in the United States.

The Italian overtook the Frenchman. The top three in the ranking are English, Spanish and Mandarin.

According to the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, in the 2016/17 academic year more than 2,1 million students in 115 countries studied the Italian language.

In the classification of languages ​​by number of speakers, English remains in the lead, with 1,19 billion people, equivalent to 17% of the world's population. Next are Mandarin (1,107 billion), Hindi (697,4 million), Spanish (512,9 million), Arabic (422 million), French (284,9 million), Malay (281 million) , Russian (264,3 million) and Bengali (262,8 million).

Portuguese appears in 10th place, with 236,5 million speakers, while Italian is in 21st place, with 67 million.

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