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It has demonstrated a capacity for growth by keeping its borders open, helping it to develop from a West Germanic dialect spoken in a small island into a world language. English is now spoken by about 1.75 billion people – a quarter of the world’s population. This includes first and second language speakers.
Below is a list of the 25 languages with the highest number of total speakers, according to data from the Ethnologue language catalog in the early 2020s. For a list of languages that counts only the number of native speakers, see languages by number of native speakers. English (1,456,448,320)
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Jan 18, 2022 · English is the world’s most widely spoken language, with some 1.5 billion speakers even though it’s native for fewer than 400 million.
- The British Empire
- Gone But Not Forgotten
- Two World Wars and The Rise of The USA
- English Is “Cool”
- Science & Technology
- Pull Not Push
- Will English Remain Number One?
After developing for almost a millennium on the British Isles, English was taken around the world by the sailors, soldiers, pilgrims, traders and missionaries of the British Empire. By the time anything resembling a language policy was introduced, English had already reached all corners of the globe. For example, English-speaking puritans were not ...
In most of the British Empire, the main goal was trade so fewer Britons actually settled. This explains why English did not come to dominate colonies in Asia and Africa, where it was the language of business, administration and education, but not the language of the people. To this day, English has a key administrative role in these former colonies...
While Europe was rebuilding in the years after 1945, the USA boomed. American businesses picked up where the British East India Company had left off centuries before, taking English around the world as a language of trade. The influence of American business, combined with the tradition of English left around the world by the British Empire, have ma...
Advertisers pride themselves on riding the cultural zeitgeist; creating consumer desire through making products sexy. One of the ways they do this is through using English words. Check out Der Spiegel’s German examples, Slate.fr’s French ones, and La Repubblica’s Italian ones. Many examples of English in advertising come from multinational companie...
The global power of the USA coincided with the birth of popular computing, and English is the language of the technological revolution and the internet. Consider a keyboard for example; they are designed for Latin characters, so speakers of Asian languages (particularly) use complicated techniques to enter words. What happensinsidethe devices is al...
Apart from the efforts of some early colonisers, hundreds of years ago, the success of English has more to do with “pull” than “push”. People in British colonies who wanted an education would receive that education in English. Artists who want to reach the largest audience for their work can do that in English. If you want to trade internationally,...
Some people suggest that English has become ubiquitous because it is “easy to learn” or especially flexible, but a glance backwards suggests that this is irrelevant. Despite a devilishly complex case system, Latin was Europe’s most influential language for over a thousand years (and its descendents are still going strong). People learned Latin then...
English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the United States.
The United States and India have the most total English speakers, with 306 million and 265 million, respectively. These are followed by Pakistan (104 million), the United Kingdom (68 million), and Nigeria (60 million). [4] As of 2022, there were about 400 million native speakers of English. [5]
5 days ago · As of 2020 there are 1.27 billion English speakers around the world. This makes it the most spoken language, ahead of Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion speakers) and Hindi (637 million speakers). More than 50 countries officially list English as an official language.
