Which language is spoken by most people?

Over 500 million people speak one of the Mandarin Chinese dialects. Chinese is unlike most other languages as it has no alphabet, but uses instead several thousand characters or symbols, each of which conveys one complete idea. Each character has only one syllable, and most words are made up of two or more characters. A character can change its meaning by the way its pronounced or by changing its position in a sentence, It is only in the last hundred years that ways have been invented to write Chinese in the Roman alphabet.