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The total English-speaking population of the European Union and the United Kingdom combined (2012) is 256,876,220 [70] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [71] i.e. 51%) including 65,478,252 native speakers and 191,397,968 non-native speakers, and would be ranked 2nd if it were included. English native speakers amount to 13% of the whole ...
As of 2022, there were about 400 million native speakers of English. [6] Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion. [2] David Crystal calculated in 2003 that non-native speakers outnumbered native speakers by a ratio of three to one. [7]
English accounts for at least 70% of total native speakers of the Germanic languages, and Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.5 billion speakers worldwide as of 2021. [ 3 ] Old English emerged from a group of West Germanic dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons .
The British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the Earth's land surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries. British English and North American English, the two major varieties of the language, are together spoken by 400 million people. The total number of English speakers worldwide may exceed one ...
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [2] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
There are over 7,000 languages in the world. Quite a few people in the world speak 2-4 languages fluently, usually because they were raised in a multilingual environment.
As of 2024, there are 57 sovereign states and 28 non-sovereign entities where English is an official language. Many administrative divisions have declared English an official language at the local or regional level. Most states where English is an official language are former territories of the British Empire.
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