Geographical distribution
Geographical distribution
See also: List of countries by English-speaking population
Pie chart showing the relative numbers of native English speakers in the major English-speaking countries of the world
Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language. English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world, though possibly second to a combination of the Chinese languages(depending on whether or not distinctions in the latter are classified as "languages" or "dialects").
Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to over a billion depending on how literacy or mastery is defined and measured. Linguistics professor David Crystal calculates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.
The countries with the highest populations of native English speakers are, in descending order:United States (215 million), United Kingdom (61 million), Canada (18.2 million), Australia(15.5 million),[Nigeria (4 million),Ireland (3.8 million), South Africa (3.7 million), and New Zealand (3.6 million) 2006 Census.No figure is given for the number of South African native speakers, but it would be somewhere between the number of people who spoke English only (3,008,058) and the total number of English speakers (3,673,623), if one ignores the 197,187 people who did not provide a usable answer[citation needed].
Countries such as the Philippines , Jamaica and Nigeria India Crystal claims that, combining native and non-native speakers, India
Posted by Unknown
on 9:34 AM. Filed under
English language
.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
Feel free to leave a response
