Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
English native speakers amount to 13% of the whole population of the EU and the UK, while the percentage of people that speak English "well enough in order to be able to have a conversation", either as first (32%), second (11%) or third (3%) foreign language, was 38%.
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.
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.
English is unusual among world languages in how many of its users are not native speakers but speakers of English as a second or foreign language. [ 96 ] Many users of English in the expanding circle use it to communicate with other people from the expanding circle, so that interaction with native speakers of English plays no part in their ...
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
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]
Hindi is one of the two official union languages of India alongside English. Hindi and Urdu (both registers of Hindustani language) are official languages along with 20 others under the Eighth Schedule of Constitution of India. Pakistan: Asia 220,892,331 [2] Urdu is co-official with English. South Africa: Africa 59,622,350 [3]