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The following is a list of English -speaking population by country, including information on both native speakers and second-language speakers.
There is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. 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]
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, one billion to 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 ...
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. [7] English is the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish; [8] it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers.
English is the most commonly spoken foreign language in 19 out of 25 European Union countries (excluding Ireland) [11] In the EU25, working knowledge of English as a foreign language is clearly leading at 38%, followed by German and French (at 14% each), Russian and Spanish (at 6% each), and Italian (3%). [12] ".
The following is a list of countries and territories where English is an official language used in citizen interactions with government officials. As of 2020, there were 58 sovereign states and 28 non-sovereign entities where English was an official language. [citation needed] Many administrative divisions have declared English an official language at the local or regional level.
In 2023, Spanish speakers made up about three-fifths of all foreign language speakers in the United States. In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau published information on the number of speakers of some 350 languages as surveyed by the ACS from 2009 to 2013, [9] [10] but it does not regularly tabulate and report data for that many languages.
Human languages ranked by their number of native speakers are as follows. All such rankings 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] For example, a language is often defined as a set of mutually intelligible varieties, but independent national standard languages may be ...