Of present-day languages with the most speakers , 12 are Indo-European : English , Spanish , Hindi , Portuguese , Bengali , Russian , German , Marathi , French , Italian , Punjabi and Urdu . They account for over 2.7 billion native speakers . Of the twenty languages with the largest numbers of native speakers according to SIL Ethnologue , twelve are Indo-European : Spanish , English , Hindi , Portuguese , Bengali , Russian , German , Marathi , French , Italian , Punjabi , and Urdu , accounting for over 1.7 billion native speakers .