How many native English speakers are there in the world?
English language
, 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish. However, when combining native and non-native speakers it may, depending on the estimate used, be the most commonly spoken language in the world. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on oceanic islands in all the major oceans.
Extinct language
As of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Most of these are minor languages in danger of extinction; one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050.
French Canadians
In Quebec, about six million French Canadians are native French speakers. 599,225 (7.7% of population) are English-speaking, Anglophones or English-speaking Quebecers, and others are Allophones (literally "other-speakers", meaning, in practice, immigrants who speak neither French nor English at home). In the United States, assimilation to the English language was more significant and very few Americans of French-Canadian ancestry or heritage speak French today.
Languages of the United Kingdom
English, in various dialects, is the most widely spoken language of the United Kingdom, however there are a number of regional languages also spoken. There are 14 indigenous languages used across the British Isles: 5 Celtic, 3 Germanic, 3 Romance, and 3 sign languages. There are also many immigrant languages spoken in the British Isles, mainly within inner city areas; these languages are mainly from South Asia and Eastern Europe.
Germanic-speaking Europe
Germanic-speaking Europe refers to the area of Europe that today uses a Germanic language. Over 200 million Europeans (some 30%) speak a Germanic language natively. At the same time 515 million speak a Germanic language natively in the whole world (6.87%).Independent European countries whose population are predominantly native speakers of a Germanic language:
Indigenous Australians
Although there are a number of commonalities between Indigenous Aboriginal Australians, there is also a great diversity among different Indigenous communities and societies in Australia, each with its own mixture of cultures, customs and languages. In present-day Australia these groups are further divided into local communities. At the time of initial European settlement, over 250 languages were spoken; it is currently estimated that 120 to 145 of these remain in use, but only 13 of these are not considered endangered. Aboriginal people today mostly speak English, with Aboriginal phrases and words being added to create Australian Aboriginal English (which also has a tangible influence of Indigenous languages in the phonology and grammatical structure). The population of Indigenous Australians at the time of permanent European settlement is contentious and has been estimated at between 318,000 and 1,000,000 with the distribution being similar to that of the current Australian population, the majority living in the south-east, centred along the Murray River. A population collapse principally from disease followed European settlement beginning with a smallpox epidemic spreading three years after the arrival of Europeans. Massacres and war by British settlers also contributed to depopulation. The characterisation of this violence as genocide is controversial and disputed.
Hispanophone
Hispanophones are estimated at between 480 and 577 (including 2nd language speakers) million globally, making Spanish the second most spoken language in terms of native speakers. Around 360 million live in Hispanic America and 45 million in Spain (70 million in Europe). There are a large number of Spanish speakers in the United States, comprising more than 34 million. There are also smaller Hispanophone groups in Canada, northern Morocco, Equatorial Guinea, Western Sahara, the Philippines and Brazil as well as in many other places around the world, particularly European Union where is one of 24 official languages and Australia.
Germans
The native language of Germans is German, a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch, and sharing many similarities with the North Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. German has been replaced by English as the dominant language of science-related Nobel Prize laureates during the second half of the 20th century. It was a lingua franca in the Holy Roman Empire.Global distribution of native speakers of the German language:
Modern English
According to the Ethnologue, there are almost 1 billion speakers of English as a first or second language. English is spoken as a first or a second language in a large number of countries, with the largest number of native speakers being in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland; there are also large populations in India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Southern Africa. It "has more non-native speakers than any other language, is more widely dispersed around the world and is used for more purposes than any other language". Its large number of speakers, plus its worldwide presence, have made English a common language ("lingua franca") "of the airlines, of the sea and shipping, of computer technology, of science and indeed of (global) communication generally".
Modern English
Modern English has many dialects spoken in many countries throughout the world, sometimes collectively referred to as the anglosphere. These dialects include American English, Australian English, British English (containing English English, Welsh English and Scottish English), Canadian English, Caribbean English, Hiberno-English, Indian English, Pakistani English, Nigerian English, New Zealand English, Philippine English, Singaporean English, and South African English.
English language
The settlement history of the English-speaking inner circle countries outside Britain helped level dialect distinctions and produce koineised forms of English in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The majority of immigrants to the United States without British ancestry rapidly adopted English after arrival. Now the majority of the United States population are monolingual English speakers, although English has been given official status by only 30 of the 50 state governments of the US.
British Empire
Most former British colonies and protectorates are among the 52 member states of the Commonwealth of Nations, a non-political, voluntary association of equal members, comprising a population of around 2.2 billion people. Sixteen Commonwealth realms voluntarily continue to share the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, as their head of state. These sixteen nations are distinct and equal legal entities – the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.
Decades, and in some cases centuries, of British rule and emigration have left their mark on the independent nations that arose from the British Empire. The empire established the use of English in regions around the world. Today it is the primary language of up to 460 million people and is spoken by about one and a half billion as a first, second or foreign language.
United Kingdom–United States relations
The two countries also have had a significant impact of the cultures of many other countries. They are the two main nodes of the Anglosphere, with a combined population of around 385 million in 2015. Together, they have given the English language a dominant role in many sectors of the modern world.
Niger–Congo languages
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. It is generally considered to be the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, ahead of Austronesian, although this is complicated by the ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger–Congo languages listed by "Ethnologue" is 1,540. It is the third-largest language family in the world by number of native speakers, comprising around 700 million people as of 2015. Within Niger–Congo, the Bantu languages alone account for 350 million people (2015), or half the total Niger–Congo speaking population.
World Englishes
Finally, the Expanding Circle encompasses countries where English plays no historical or governmental role, but where it is nevertheless widely used as a medium of international communication. This includes much of the rest of the world's population not categorized above, including territories such as China, Russia, Japan, non-Anglophone Europe (especially the Netherlands and Nordic countries), South Korea, Egypt and Indonesia. The total in this expanding circle is the most difficult to estimate, especially because English may be employed for specific, limited purposes, usually in a business context. The estimates of these users range from 100 million to one billion.
Germanic languages
The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360-400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 0.3 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it (at least 5 million in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands); Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe and Scots, both with 1.5 million native speakers; Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border; and the Frisian languages with over 0.5 million native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany.
NNEST
Despite the fact that today, about 80% of English language teachers in the world are non-native English-speaking teachers, English is no longer considered to be an exclusive possession of native speakers, and it "belongs to all people who speak it, whether native and nonnative, whether ESL or EFL, whether standard or non-standard" (Norton 1997), NNESTs encounter discriminatory practices all around the world. There have been several research studies exploring the hiring preferences of administrators which empirically demonstrated the importance of 'nativeness' as a job requirement. In addition, online job repositories such as Dave's ESL Café, Chronicle of Higher Education, or TESOL's Online Career Center host job advertisements which include 'nativeness' as a job requirement.
Discriminatory practices against NNESTs in English language teaching generated a series of institutionalized anti-discriminatory practices such as "Statement on Nonnative Speakers of English and Hiring Practices" and "Position Statement against Discrimination of Nonnative Speakers of English in the Field of TESOL". In addition, it was decided in ASEAN 2005 Conference to establish "Centers for English Language Training" in South-East Asian countries to support local solutions to local needs by means of local tools.
English-speaking world
Additionally, there are 60 million native English speakers in the United Kingdom, 19 million in Canada, 25.1 million in Australia, 4.8 million in Ireland, and 4.8 million in New Zealand. Other countries also use English as their primary and official languages.
Anglo-Americans
Anglo-Americans are people who are English-speaking inhabitants of Anglo-America. It typically refers to the nations and ethnic groups in the Americas that speak English as a native language who comprise the majority of people who speak English as a first language. This usage originated in the discussion of the history of English-speaking people of the United States and the Spanish-speaking people residing in the western United States during the Mexican–American War.
English-language learner
Various terms are used to refer to students who are not proficient in English, such as English Language Learner (ELLs), English learner, English as a Second Language (ESL), English as an Additional Language (EAL), limited English proficient (LEP), Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD), non-native English speaker, bilingual students, heritage language, emergent bilingual, and language-minority students. "English Language Learner" was first used by Mark LaCelle-Peterson and Charlene Rivera in 1994 (LaCelle Peterson and Rivera, 1984). The term was introduced partially in response to critiques that for many students English may be not just their second language, but their third or fourth. It also implies that the student is currently in the process of improving their English language proficiency. However, this term also causes controversy. Native English speakers are also English language learners. Native English-speaking students also learn about new vocabulary. Language minority students is also commonly used to describe this population. But according to Wright, "There is some concern about the use of the term minority because, in increasing numbers of schools and communities across the United States, the majority of students are speakers of 'minority' languages." The legal term that is used in federal legislation is limited English proficient.
List of Tungusic languages
Some Tungusic ethnic groups are much larger than their native language community, especially the Manchu people, that number more than 10 million 430 thousand (but today there are only 10 native/first language speakers of Manchu language and some thousands that are second languages speakers).
Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act
According to Willard Gilbert, president of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA), "There were 175 Native American languages still spoken in 1996. However only twenty of these languages will still be spoken by the year 2050 without urgent help to keep them alive."
German language
Due to the German diaspora as well as German being the second most widely spoken language in Europe and the third most widely taught foreign language in the US and the EU (in upper secondary education) amongst others, the geographical distribution of German speakers (or "Germanophones") spans all inhabited continents. As for the number of speakers of any language worldwide, an assessment is always compromised by the lack of sufficient, reliable data. For an exact, global number of native German speakers, this is further complicated by the existence of several varieties whose status as separate "languages" or "dialects" is disputed for political and/or linguistic reasons, including quantitatively strong varieties like certain forms of Alemannic (e.g., Alsatian) and Low German/Plautdietsch. Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties, it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language, 10–25 million as a second language, and 75–100 million as a foreign language. This would imply approximately 175–220 million German speakers worldwide. It is estimated that also including all persons who are or were taking German classes, i.e., regardless of their actual proficiency, would amount to about 280 million people worldwide with at least some knowledge of German.
Society of the United States
The primary, although not official, language of the United States is English. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, more than 93% of Americans can speak English well, and for 81% it is the only language spoken at home. Nearly 30 million native speakers of Spanish also reside in the US. There are more than 300 languages besides English which can claim native speakers in the United States—some of which are spoken by the indigenous peoples (about 150 living languages) and others which were imported by immigrants.
English Americans
English Americans (also referred to as Anglo-Americans) are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England.
In the 2017 American Community Survey, English Americans are (7.1%) of the total population.
Spanish language in the United States
The United States has forty-one million people aged five or older that speak Spanish at home, making Spanish the second most spoken language of the United States by far. Spanish is the most studied foreign language in United States, with about six million students. With over 50 million native speakers, heritage language speakers and second language speakers, the United States now has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico, although it is not an official language of the country. About half of all American Spanish speakers also assessed themselves as speaking English "very well" in the 2000 U.S. Census. This percentage increased to 57% in the 2013-2017 American Community Survey. The United States is among the Spanish-speaking countries that has its own Academy of the Spanish Language.
English as a second or foreign language
Most people who teach English are in fact not native speakers. They are state school teachers in countries around the world, and as such they hold the relevant teaching qualification of their country, usually with a specialization in teaching English. For example, teachers in Hong Kong hold the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers. Those who work in private language schools may, from commercial pressures, have the same qualifications as native speakers (see below). Widespread problems exist of minimal qualifications and poor quality providers of training, and as the industry becomes more professional, it is trying to self-regulate to eliminate these.
Language
The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. The total number of languages in the world is not known. Estimates vary depending on many factors. The consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, and that between 50–90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages, those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.
First Nations
Today, there are over thirty different languages spoken by indigenous people, most of which are spoken only in Canada. Many are in decline. Those with the most speakers include Anishinaabe and Cree (together totalling up to 150,000 speakers); Inuktitut with about 29,000 speakers in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nunavik (Northern Quebec), and Nunatsiavut (Northern Labrador); and Mi'kmaq, with around 8,500 speakers, mostly in Eastern Canada. Many Aboriginal peoples have lost their native languages and often all but surviving elders speak English or French as their first language.
Spanish language
Spanish is the primary language of 20 countries worldwide. It is estimated that the combined total number of Spanish speakers is between 470 and 500 million, making it the second most widely spoken language in terms of native speakers.
Geographical distribution of French speakers
It is estimated that 80 million people worldwide speak French as a main or first language.
Scottish diaspora
A Scottish Argentine population has existed at least since 1825. There are an estimated 100,000 Argentines of Scottish ancestry, the most of any country outside the English-speaking world. Scottish Argentines have been incorrectly referred to as English.
Contents of the Voyager Golden Record
The second audio section ("Greetings in 55 Languages") contains spoken greetings in 55 languages. The original plan was to use greetings made by United Nations delegates, but various problems with these recordings led to new recordings being made at Cornell University by people from the foreign-language departments. The number of native speakers of these 55 languages combined (excluding L2 speakers) is over 4.7 billion people, comprising over 65% of the world population. It includes four Chinese varieties (marked with **), 12 South Asian languages (marked #) and five ancient languages (marked §), listed here in alphabetical order:
Geographical distribution of Ukrainian speakers
There are an estimated 35 million native speakers of Ukrainian worldwide (of whom 32 million or 91% live in Ukraine).
Languages of the United States
The most commonly used language in the United States is English (specifically, American English), which is the de facto national language. Nonetheless, many other languages are also spoken, or historically have been spoken, in the United States. These include indigenous languages, languages brought to the country by colonists, enslaved people and immigrants from Europe, Africa and Asia. There are also several languages, including creoles and sign languages, that developed in the United States. Approximately 430 languages are spoken or signed by the population, of which 176 are indigenous to the area. Fifty-two languages formerly spoken in the country's territory are now extinct.
Non-resident Indian and person of Indian origin
There are 2,360,000 people currently speaking Indian languages in the United Kingdom. Punjabi is now the second most widely spoken language in the United Kingdom, and the most frequently spoken language among school pupils who do not have English as a first language.
National language
The English language (British English) is the "de facto" official language of the United Kingdom and is the sole language of an estimated 95% of the British population. The three Home Nations outside England have national languages of their own with varying degrees of recognition, which coexist with the dominant English language. Britain also has several Crown dependencies and Overseas Territories which are to some extent self-governing, but which are not recognized as independent states. Many of these have their own regional languages.
World Englishes
The first diaspora involved relatively large-scale migrations of mother-tongue English speakers from England, Scotland and Ireland predominantly to North America and the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. Over time, their own English dialects developed into modern American, Canadian, West Indian, South African, Australian, and New Zealand Englishes. In contrast to the English of Great Britain, the varieties spoken in modern North America and Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand have been modified in response to the changed and changing sociolinguistic contexts of the migrants, for example being in contact with indigenous Native American, Khoisan and Bantu, Aboriginal or Maori populations in the colonies.
World language
The major languages of the Indian subcontinent have numbers of speakers comparable to those of major world languages primarily due to the large population in the region rather than a supra-regional use of these languages, although Hindustani (including all Hindi dialects, and Urdu), Bengali and Tamil may fulfill the criteria in terms of supra-regional usage and international recognition. As an example, the native speaking population of Bengali vastly outnumber those who speak French as a first language, and it is one of the most spoken languages (ranking fifth or sixth) in the world with nearly 230 million total speakers, and is known for its long and rich literary tradition.
English-speaking world
There are six large countries with a majority of native English speakers that are sometimes grouped under the term Anglosphere. In numbers of English speakers they are: the United States (at least 231 million), the United Kingdom (60 million), Canada (at least 20 million), Australia (at least 17 million), Ireland (4.8 million) and New Zealand (4.8 million).
Indo-European migrations
Today the Romance languages, which comprise all languages that descended from Latin, are spoken by more than 800 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Romance languages are either official, co-official, or significantly used in 72 countries around the globe.
English Canadians
Depending on the principal period of immigration to Canada and other factors, ethnic groups (other than British Isles, French, and Aboriginal ones) vary in their percentage of native speakers of English. For example, while a roughly equal number of Canadians have at least partial Ukrainian and Chinese ancestry, 82% of Ukrainian Canadians speak English as their sole mother tongue, and only 17% of Chinese Canadians do (though this rises to 34% in the 0 to 14 age group). As the number of second and third-generation Chinese Canadians increases, their weight within the English-speaking population can also be expected to increase. It should also be borne in mind that some percentage of any minority ethnic group will adopt French, particularly in Quebec.
Product naming
Because English is widely viewed as a global language, with over 380 million native speakers, many international trademarks are created in English. Still, language differences present difficulties when using a trademark internationally.
History of the Irish language
Today, estimates of fully native speakers range from 40,000 to 80,000 people. In the republic, there are just over 72,000 people who use Irish as a daily language outside education, as well as a larger minority of the population who are fluent but do not use it on a daily basis. (While census figures indicate that 1.66 million people in the republic have some knowledge of the language, a significant percentage of these know only a little.) Smaller numbers of Irish speakers exist in Britain, Canada (particularly in Newfoundland), the United States of America and other countries.
Sino-Tibetan languages
The Sino-Tibetan languages, in a few sources also known as Trans-Himalayan, are a family of more than 400 languages spoken in East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The family is second only to Indo-European in terms of the number of native speakers. The Sino-Tibetan languages with the most native speakers are the varieties of Chinese (1.3 billion), Burmese (33 million), and the Tibetic languages (6 million), but many Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by small communities in remote mountain areas and as such are poorly documented. Unlike Western linguists, Chinese linguists generally include Kra–Dai and Hmong-Mien languages within Sino-Tibetan.
National Council of Teachers of English
The NCTE currently has a reported 35,000 members and subscribers in the United States and internationally. This membership is composed of teachers and supervisors of English programs ranging from elementary, middle, and secondary schools to faculty in college and university English departments as well as teacher educators, local and state agency English specialists, and other professionals in directly related fields. Sponsoring over 120 regional, state, provincial, local, and student affiliates within the United States, Canada, and Asian countries, the NCTE continues it rapid annual growth.
Indigenous language
Forty six languages are known to have just one native speaker while 357 languages have fewer than 50 speakers. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than more common ones.
Southwestern Mandarin
Varieties of Southwestern Mandarin are spoken by roughly 260 million people. If considered a language distinct from Mandarin, it would have the eighth-most native speakers in the world, behind Mandarin itself, Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic and Bengali.
Languages of the United States
English was inherited from British colonization, and it is spoken by the majority of the population. It serves as the de facto national language, the language in which government business is carried out. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 80% spoke only English at home and all but approximately 13,600,000 U.S. residents age 5 and over speak English "well" or "very well".
English Chileans
English Chileans (Spanish: "Anglochilenos") are citizens of Chile who are descended from English people who have emigrated. They are estimated to number 700,000 (4% of the national population).
List of languages by number of native speakers
The following table contains the top 100 languages by estimated number of native speakers in the 2007 edition of the Swedish encyclopedia "Nationalencyklopedin". As census methods in different countries vary to a considerable extent, and given that some countries do not record language in their censuses, any list of languages by native speakers, or total speakers, is effectively based on estimates. Updated estimates from 2010 are also provided.
Hawaiian language
Today, the number of native speakers of Hawaiian, which was under 0.1% of the statewide population in 1997, has risen to 2,000, out of 24,000 total who are fluent in the language, according to the US 2011 census. On six of the seven permanently inhabited islands, Hawaiian has been largely displaced by English, but on Niihau, native speakers of Hawaiian have remained fairly isolated and have continued to use Hawaiian almost exclusively.
United States
English (American English) is the de facto national language. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. Spanish, spoken by 12% of the population at home, is the second most common language and the most widely taught second language. Some Americans advocate making English the country's official language, as it is in 32 states.
Afrikaners
Afrikaners make up approximately 58% of South Africa's white population, based on language used in the home. English speakers - an ethnically diverse group - account for closer to 37%. As in Canada or the United States, most modern European immigrants elect to learn English and are likelier to identify with those descended from British colonials of the nineteenth century. Aside from coastal pockets in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal they remain heavily outnumbered by those of Afrikaans origin.
Indo-European migrations
Indo-European languages are spoken by almost 3 billion native speakers, the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of native speakers according to "Ethnologue", twelve are Indo-European: Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Punjabi, Marathi, French, Urdu, Italian, accounting for over 1.7 billion native speakers.
Pluricentric language
Statistically, however, American English speakers constitute more than 66% of native English speakers, with British English next with about 18% and other varieties such as Australian English and Canadian English having up to 7% each. Due to globalization in recent decades, English is becoming increasingly decentralized, with daily use and statewide study of the language in schools growing in most regions of the world.
World Englishes
The Outer Circle of English was produced by the second diaspora of English, which spread the language through imperial expansion by Great Britain in Asia and Africa. In these regions, English is not the native tongue, but serves as a useful lingua franca between ethnic and language groups. Higher education, the legislature and judiciary, national commerce and so on may all be carried out predominantly in English. This circle includes India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia, Tanzania, Kenya, non-Anglophone South Africa, the Philippines (colonized by the US) and others. The total number of English speakers in the outer circle is estimated to range from 150 million to 300 million. Singapore, while in the Outer Circle, may be drifting into the Inner Circle as English becomes more often used as a home language (see Languages of Singapore), much as Ireland did earlier. Countries where most people speak an English-based creole and retain standard English for official purposes, such as Jamaica and Papua New Guinea, are also in the Outer Circle.
British Sign Language
In 2016 the British Deaf Association says that, based on official statistics, it believes there are 151,000 people who use BSL in the UK, and 87,000 of these are deaf. This figure does not include professional BSL users, interpreters, translators, etc. unless they use BSL at home.
Romance languages
Today, around 800 million people are native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, but also elsewhere. Additionally, the major Romance languages have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas. This is especially the case for French, which is in widespread use throughout Central and West Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Maghreb.
Language school
Globally, English language schools have seen the greatest demand over schools for other languages. Over one billion people are said to be learning English in a second language or foreign language context. In the United States alone, ESL learners make up over one-third of all adult, non-academic learners. English learning has experienced the highest increase in demand over the last three years, with an increase of 67%. The United States and the UK are the biggest players in the global English travel market accounting for 62% of the total revenue earned in 2013, and account for 65.5% of students worldwide.
Sri Lankan English
Sri Lankan English (SLE, en-LK) or Ceylonese English is the English language as it is spoken in Sri Lanka. However, the classification of SLE as a separate dialect of English is controversial. English in Sri Lanka is fluently spoken by approximately 48% of the population, and widely used for official and commercial purposes. It is the native language of approximately 74,000 people.
Germans
Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, roughly 80 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil (mainly in the South Region of the country), Argentina, Canada, South Africa, the post-Soviet states (mainly in Russia and Kazakhstan), and France, each accounting for at least 1 million. Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).
Translanguaging
Non-native speakers of English around the world outnumber native English speakers of English by a ratio of 3:1. At the current influx of technology and communication, English has become a heavily transnational language. As such, English varieties, and International Englishes are becoming standard usage in international economic exchanges, thereby increasing their legitimacy and decreasing the dominance of the standard American and British English varieties.
Crazy English
For over a decade China has been gripped by the “English Fever” phenomenon as the country increasingly associates English language skills with success in the business world. Though China states that it has the largest number, 300 million, of English speakers in the world, the number of people who translate their reading and writing skills to spoken word decreases substantially. This issue with students not being comfortable or confident in speaking English opened the door for Li Yang's Crazy English method of teaching.
List of countries where Spanish is an official language
Spanish has been spoken in the United States for several centuries in the Southwest and Florida, which were all once part of New Spain. However, today only a tiny minority of Spanish speakers in the US trace their language back to those times; the overwhelming majority of speakers come from recent immigration. Only in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado has Spanish maintained speaking communities uninterruptedly since colonial times. Spanish is the most studied foreign language in United States schools and is spoken as a native tongue by 41 million people, plus an additional 11 million fluent second-language speakers. Though not official, Spanish has a special status for education in the U.S. state of New Mexico. With over 50 million native speakers and second language speakers, the United States now has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico. Spanish is increasingly used alongside English nationwide in business and politics. In the United States, the language is regulated by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language.
English-speaking world
Other substantial communities of native speakers are found in South Africa (4.8 million) and Nigeria (4 million, 5%).
Language
The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu). The Indo-European family achieved prevalence first during the Eurasian Migration Period (c. 400–800 AD), and subsequently through the European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20% of the world's population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages.
English language
Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English in the process of growing up through day by day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by speakers who are not native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries, and they may have grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.
English people
The English people are a nation and an ethnic group native to England who speak the English language. The English identity is of early medieval origin, when they were known in Old English as the "Angelcynn" ("family of the Angles"). Their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Great Britain around the 5th century AD. England is one of the countries of the United Kingdom, and the majority of people living there are British citizens.
Navajo Nation
According to the 2016 census, the Navajo Nation had a population of 356,890. According to the same source, 166,826 were Navajo or other Native American (previously reported here as 96% despite actually being only about 47%), 3,249 White, 401 Asian or Pacific Islanders, 208 African American, and the remainder identifying some other group or more than one ancestry. The 2010 census counts 109,963 individuals who report speaking a language at home that is neither Asian nor Indo-European.
DiscoverNavajo.com reports that 96% of the Navajo Nation is American Indian, and 66% of Navajo tribe members live on Navajo Nation.
English people
Australians of English descent, are both the single largest ethnic group in Australia and the largest 'ancestry' identity in the Australian census.
In the 2016 census, 7.8 million or 36.1% of the population identified as "English" or a combination including English, a numerical increase from 7.2 million over the 2011 census figure. The census also documented 907,572 residents or 3.9% of Australia as being born in England, and are the largest overseas-born population.
David Graddol
David Graddol (born 1953) is a British linguist who has worked in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and history of linguistics. He is perhaps best known for his 1997 book "The future of English?", published by the British Council, in which he offers scenarios for how English as a world language may develop. Most notably, he points out that native speakers of English are or will soon be outnumbered by those who speak English as a second or foreign language. In an article that focuses more specifically on this issue, he states the following:
Punjabis
Punjabi is the most spoken language in Pakistan and eleventh most spoken language in India. According to the Ethnologue 2005 estimate, there are 130 million native speakers of the Punjabi language, which makes it the ninth most widely spoken language in the world. According to a 2008 estimate, there are approximately 76,335,300 native speakers of Punjabi in Pakistan, and according to the Census of India, there are over 29,102,477 Punjabi speakers in India. Punjabi is also spoken as a minority language in several other countries where Punjabis have emigrated in large numbers, such as the United Kingdom (where it is the second most commonly used language) and Canada, in which Punjabi has now become the fourth most spoken language after English, French and Chinese, due to the rapid growth of immigrants from Pakistan and India. There are also sizeable communities in the United States, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Persian Gulf countries, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
Language
According to the "Ethnologue", 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world's population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population. To the right is a table of the world's 10 most spoken languages with population estimates from the "Ethnologue" (2009 figures).
English-speaking world
Besides the major varieties of English, such as British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, Irish English, New Zealand English and their sub-varieties, countries such as South Africa, India, the Philippines, Jamaica and Nigeria also have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from English-based creole languages to Standard English.
Languages of the United States
Spanish is spoken by approximately 35 million people. The United States has the world's fifth largest Spanish-speaking population, outnumbered only by Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Argentina; other estimates put the United States at over 50 million, second only to Mexico. Throughout the Southwestern United States, long-established Spanish-speaking communities coexist with large numbers of more recent Hispanophone immigrants. Although many new Latin American immigrants are less than fluent in English, nearly all second-generation Hispanic Americans speak English fluently, while only about half still speak Spanish.
India as an emerging superpower
The importance of the English language in the 21st century is a topic of debate, nonetheless the growing pool of non-native English speakers makes it the best contender for "Global language" status. Incidentally, India has the world's largest English speaking/understanding population. It claims one of the largest workforce of engineers, doctors and other key professionals, all comfortable with English. It has the 2nd largest population of "fluent English" speakers, second only to the United States, with estimates ranging from 150 to 250 million speakers, and is expected to have the largest in coming decades. Indians are also learning Dutch, Italian, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.
Urdu
According to Nationalencyklopedin's 2010 estimates, Urdu is the 21st most spoken first language in the world, with approximately 66 million speakers. According to Ethnologue's 2017 estimates, Urdu, along with standard Hindi and the languages of the Hindi belt (as Hindustani), is the 3rd most spoken language in the world, with approximately 329.1 million native speakers, and 697.4 million total speakers.
Intercultural bilingual education
In the U.S. and Canada there are an estimated 184 living indigenous languages—however, only 20 of these 184 are currently learned in a naturalistic environment by children (that is to say, learned at home through immersion with family and community). Many of these minority languages are part of the various Native American tribes which, through the history of reservation creation and racism by the dominant society, have come close to extinction. Similarly to the case with the Hispanicization of Latin America, the prevailing idea that English is a prestige language associated with opportunity and literacy led to an ambivalence towards sustaining various tribal languages—despite the important role they play in tribal community and ethnic identity.
Welsh language
The number of Welsh-speaking people in the rest of Britain has not yet been counted for statistical purposes. In 1993, the Welsh-language television channel S4C published the results of a survey into the numbers of people who spoke or understood Welsh, which estimated that there were around 133,000 Welsh-speaking people living in England, about 50,000 of them in the Greater London area. The Welsh Language Board, on the basis of an analysis of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study, estimated there were 110,000 Welsh-speaking people in England, and another thousand in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the 2011 Census, 8,248 people in England gave Welsh in answer to the question "What is your main language?" The ONS subsequently published a census glossary of terms to support the release of results from the census, including their definition of "main language" as referring to "first or preferred language" (though that wording was not in the census questionnaire itself). The wards in England with the most people giving Welsh as their main language were the Liverpool wards of Central and Greenbank, and Oswestry South. In terms of the regions of England, North West England (1,945), London (1,310) and the West Midlands (1,265) had the highest number of people noting Welsh as their main language.
Great Britain
British English is spoken in the present day across the island, and developed from the Old English brought to the island by Anglo-Saxon settlers from the mid 5th century. Some 1.5 million people speak Scots—a variety of English which some consider to be a distinct language. An estimated 700,000 people speak Welsh, an official language in Wales. In parts of north west Scotland, Scottish Gaelic remains widely spoken. There are various regional dialects of English, and numerous languages spoken by some immigrant populations.
Russians
According to data published in the journal «Language Monthly» (№ 3, 1997), approximately 300 million people around the world at the time mastered the Russian language (making it the 5th most popular language in the world by total number of speakers), while 160 million considered Russian their native language (making it the 7th in the world by number of native speakers). The total number of Russian speakers in the world in the 1999 assessment was about 167 million, with about 110 million people speaking Russian as a second language.
Languages of the United States
Cherokee is one of the few, or perhaps the only, Native American language with an increasing population of speakers, and along with Navajo it is the only indigenous language with more than 50,000 speakers, a figure most likely achieved through the tribe's 10-year long language preservation plan involving growing new speakers through immersion schools for children, developing new words for modern phrases, teaching the language to non-Cherokee in schools and universities, fostering the language among young adults so their children can use that language at home, developing iPhone and iPad apps for language education, the development of language radio stations including Cherokee Voices, Cherokee Sounds, and promoting the writing system through public signage, products like Apple Inc., internet use through Google including Gmail, and others so the language remains relevant in the 21st century.
Languages of the United States
American Sign Language (ASL) is the native language of a number of deaf and hearing people in America (roughly 100,000 to 500,000). While some sources have stated that ASL is the third most frequently used language in the United States, after English and Spanish, recent scholarship has pointed out that most of these estimates are based on numbers conflating deafness with ASL use, and that the last actual study of this (in 1972) seems to indicate an upper bound of 500,000 ASL speakers at the time.
Lists of endangered languages
While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will become extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years.
Demographics of the world
Worldwide, English is used widely as a lingua franca and can be seen to be the dominant language at this time. The world's largest language by native speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is a first language of around 960 million people, or 12.44% of the population, predominantly in Greater China. Spanish is spoken by around 330 to 400 million people, predominantly in the Americas and Spain. Arabic is spoken by around 280 million people. Bengali is spoken by around 250 to 300 million people worldwide, predominantly in Bangladesh and India. Hindi is spoken by about 200 million speakers, mostly in India. Portuguese is spoken by about 230 million speakers in Portugal, Brazil, East Timor, and Southern Africa.
Language education by region
Despite the high rate of foreign language teaching in schools, the number of adults claiming to speak a foreign language is generally lower than might be expected. This is particularly true of native English speakers: in 2004 a British survey showed that only one in 10 UK workers could speak a foreign language. Less than 5% could count to 20 in a second language, for example. 80% said they could work abroad anyway, because "everyone speaks English." In 2001, a European Commission survey found that 65.9% of people in the UK spoke only their native tongue.
English-speaking world
English is one of the eleven official languages that are given equal status in South Africa (South African English). It is also the official language in current dependent territories of Australia (Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and Cocos Island) and of the United States (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico (in Puerto Rico, English is co-official with Spanish) and the US Virgin Islands), and the former British colony of Hong Kong. (See List of countries where English is an official language for more details.)
Russian language
Russian is the largest native language in Europe and the most geographically widespread language in Eurasia. It is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, with 144 million speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the seventh by total number of speakers. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the third most widespread language on the Internet after English and German, respectively.
United Kingdom
Four Celtic languages are spoken in the UK: Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish. All are recognised as regional or minority languages, by the European Union, under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. As it is an EU member state, this therefore obliges the UK government to provide them specific measures of protection and promotion. In the 2001 Census over a fifth (21%) of the population of Wales said they could speak Welsh, an increase from the 1991 Census (18%). In addition it is estimated that about 200,000 Welsh speakers live in England. In the same census in Northern Ireland 167,487 people (10.4%) stated that they had "some knowledge of Irish" (see Irish language in Northern Ireland), almost exclusively in the nationalist (mainly Catholic) population. Over 92,000 people in Scotland (just under 2% of the population) had some Gaelic language ability, including 72% of those living in the Outer Hebrides. The number of schoolchildren being taught through Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish is increasing. Among emigrant-descended populations some Scottish Gaelic is still spoken in Canada (principally Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island), and Welsh in Patagonia, Argentina.
Official language
Worldwide, 178 countries have at least one official language, and 101 of these countries recognise more than one language. Many of the world's constitutions mention one or more official or national languages. Some countries use the official language designation to empower indigenous groups by giving them access to the government in their native languages. In countries that do not formally designate an official language, a "de facto" national language usually evolves. English is the most common official language, with recognized status in 51 countries. Arabic, French, and Spanish are also widely recognized.
England
As its name suggests, the English language, today spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world, originated as the language of England, where it remains the principal tongue spoken by 98% of the population. It is an Indo-European language in the Anglo-Frisian branch of the Germanic family. After the Norman conquest, the Old English language was displaced and confined to the lower social classes as Norman French and Latin were used by the aristocracy.
Gwich’in language
Few Gwichʼin speak their heritage language as a majority of the population shifts to English. According to the UNESCO "Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger," Gwich’in is now "severely endangered." There are about 260 Gwich’in speakers in Canada out of a total Gwich’in population of 1,900. About 300 out of a total Alaska Gwich’in population of 1,100 speak the language.
Languages of Europe
Roughly 215 million Europeans (primarily in Southern and Western Europe) are native speakers of Romance languages, the largest groups including
French (c. 69 million),
Italian (c. 65 million),
Spanish (Castilian) (c. 40 million), 
Romanian (c. 23 million),
Portuguese (c. 10 million),
Sicilian (c. 5 million, also subsumed under Italian),
Catalan (c. 4 million),
Galician (c. 2 million),
Sardinian (c. 1 million),
Occitan (c. 500,000),
besides numerous smaller communities.
European Day of Languages
There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe – roughly 3% of the world's total. Most of the European languages are of Indo-European origin. Since the end of the 18th century, the most widespread language of Europe (both in terms of geography and the number of native speakers) has been Russian, which replaced French. Counting only native speakers, approximately 150 million Europeans speak Russian on a daily basis, followed by German (approx. 95 mil.), English and French (each by 65 mil.), Italian (60 mil.), Spanish and Polish (40 mil. each), Ukrainian (30 mil.) and Romanian (26 mil.). As far as foreign language studies are concerned, English is currently the most popular foreign language in Europe, followed by German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish
English language
Estimates of the number of English speakers who are second language and foreign-language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1,000 million depending on how proficiency is defined. Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. In Kachru's three-circles model, the "outer circle" countries are countries such as the Philippines, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Singapore, and Nigeria with a much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English as a second language for education, government, or domestic business,
and where English is routinely used for school instruction and official interactions with the government.
English language
As decolonisation proceeded throughout the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, former colonies often did not reject English but rather continued to use it as independent countries setting their own language policies. For example, the view of the English language among many Indians has gone from associating it with colonialism to associating it with economic progress, and English continues to be an official language of India. English is also widely used in media and literature, and the number of English language books published annually in India is the third largest in the world after the US and UK. However English is rarely spoken as a first language, numbering only around a couple hundred-thousand people, and less than 5% of the population speak fluent English in India. David Crystal claimed in 2004 that, combining native and non-native speakers, India now has more people who speak or understand English than any other country in the world, but the number of English speakers in India is very uncertain, with most scholars concluding that the United States still has more speakers of English than India.
Esperanto culture
Native Esperanto speakers are people who have acquired Esperanto as one of their native languages. As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents. In all but a handful of cases, it was the father who used Esperanto with the child. In the majority of such families, the parents had the same native language, though in many the parents had different native languages, and only Esperanto in common.
English-speaking world
India now claims to be the world's second-largest English-speaking country. The most reliable estimate is around 10% of its population or 125 million people, second only to the US and expected to quadruple in the next decade.
Canadian English
Canadian English (CanE, CE, en-CA) is the set of varieties of the English language native to Canada. According to the 2011 census, English was the first language of approximately 19 million Canadians, or 57% of the population; the remainder of the population were native speakers of Canadian French (22%) or other languages (allophones, 21%). A larger number, 28 million people, reported using English as their dominant language. 82% of Canadians outside the province of Quebec reported speaking English natively, but within Quebec the figure was just 7.7% as most of its residents are native speakers of Quebec French.
Spanish language
Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. It is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the African Union and by many other international organizations.
It is estimated that more than 437 million people speak Spanish as a native language, which qualifies it as second on the lists of languages by number of native speakers. Instituto Cervantes claims that there are an estimated 477 million Spanish speakers with native competence and 572 million Spanish speakers as a first or second language—including speakers with limited competence—and more than 21 million students of Spanish as a foreign language.