Comment by JumpCrisscross

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 months ago

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> there’s only 380 million native English speakers

Not how a lingua franca works.

There are 1.5 to 2 billion English speakers [1]. By far the largest number of people to speak a single language. Most of them are in America [2]. (If you count English learners, No. 2 is China [3].)

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today/articl...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236986651_The_stati...

ANewFormation 3 months ago

CIA gives 18.8%, so about 1.5 billion. [1]

But this number is dubious as it's largely from self response. Here [2] is a list by country. So 25% of Thais, 50% of Ukrainians, 50% of Poles, and so on "speak English."

In the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true. But "my name is Bob" maketh not a common tongue. If we narrowed it down to the percent of people that could hold a basic conversation, the number would plummet precipitously, likely leaving Mandarin at the top.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

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  • JumpCrisscross 3 months ago

    > the number would plummet precipitously, likely leaving Mandarin at the top

    70% of Chinese speak Mandarin as a first language [1].

    > the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true

    This is English learners. If you count English learners, a third of Chinese speak English and a majority of the internet-connected world.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

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    • ANewFormation 3 months ago

      What I'm saying is that those are people counted as "knowing English" since the typical way such things are measured is self response. Nowhere remotely near the peecents stated for many countries is accurate.

      China's also been pushing Mandarin lately and claim 85%.

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Retric 3 months ago

Being fluent is a different question, you can dream in English without it being your native language.

first language = A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language

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  • JumpCrisscross 3 months ago

    Yes, we understand what a first language is. You should understand why that’s irrelevant to this discussion.

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    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 months ago

      You know, they weren't the one to bring it up and their point seems to have consistently been that the majority of the global population does not speak English.

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      • lelanthran 3 months ago

        > You know, they weren't the one to bring it up and their point seems to have consistently been that the majority of the global population does not speak English.

        While that has consistently been their point, it's also wrong.

        Their bar for "speaking English" is "Native Language". Absolutely no one uses that as a bar when talking about how many people can consume content in $LANGUAGE.

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        • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 months ago

          That is not their bar. Read this more carefully:

          > 1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.

          1/3 of the population speaks English “at all” (by which they mean speaking fluently, not learning) and 380 million people (roughly 5% of the population) is native.

          Not trying to throw shade at anyone but it’s really... not hard for a reader to pause a little when one reads something that sounds wrong; it’s possible the reader misread. It’s even in the guidelines under different words:

          > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

          There was a lot of failure to follow to this guideline in this comment thread.

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