Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Varieties of English learned by non-native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. [82] Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries, [ 82 ] and they may show grammatical ...
English language teaching (ELT) is a widely used teacher-centered term, as in the English language teaching divisions of large publishing houses, ELT training, etc. Teaching English as a second language (TESL), teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), and teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) are also used.
Although Old English is the direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary English speakers. All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community.
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.
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, [b] is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. [4] English is the most widely spoken language in the United States .
The word "semi-speaker" was introduced by linguist Nancy Dorian in describing the last speakers of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic. [2] [1] When semi-speakers form a significant part of the speech community, language contraction often ensues, as the linguistic norms are accommodated to speakers' competences. [9] [10]
The definition of multilingualism is a subject of debate in the same way as that of language fluency. At one end of the linguistic continuum, multilingualism may be defined as the mastery of more than one language. The speaker would have knowledge of and control over the languages equivalent to that of a native speaker.