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The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. 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.
The United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, where the overwhelming majority of native English speakers reside, do not have English as an official language de jure, but English is considered their de facto official language because it dominates in these countries. [citation needed]
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, [1] [2] making it the largest language by number of speakers, the third largest language by number of native speakers and the most widespread language geographically.
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers.. Current distribution of human language families. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]
Estimates of the numbers of second language and foreign-language English speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1 billion, depending on how proficiency is defined. [9] Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. [87]
Chief among other native English dialects are Canadian English and Australian English, which rank third and fourth in the number of native speakers. [4] For the most part, Canadian English, while featuring numerous British forms, alongside indigenous Canadianisms, shares vocabulary, phonology and syntax with American English, which leads many ...
The International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) is a free, online archive of primary-source dialect and accent recordings of the English language. The archive was founded by Paul Meier in 1998 at the University of Kansas and includes hundreds of recordings of English speakers throughout the world.
For example, nouns and verbs that go together ("ride a bike" or "drive a car"). Native speakers tend to use chunks [clarification needed] of collocations and ESL learners make mistakes with collocations. Slang and colloquialisms – In most native English-speaking countries, many slang and colloquial terms are used in everyday speech. Many ...