Comment by InsideOutSanta

Comment by InsideOutSanta 13 hours ago

There are only about 400 million native English speakers. You can't just add up the population of English speaking countries, because that excludes immigrants living in these countries, and people born there who did not learn English as their first language.

As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.

whoistraitor 13 hours ago

IMO first-or-not is moot. It’s estimated that around one billion people speak English to a reasonably fluent level. Included in that is many of the commonwealth countries in which English often holds second spot as a lingua franca (eg. India). It’s an incredibly global language.

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InsideOutSanta 13 hours ago

I don't think anyone disputes that it is an incredibly global language. I certainly don't.

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permo-w 13 hours ago

this is horseshit. Canada, the US and the UK alone have - minimum - 400 million. Australia has 25 million, Ireland 5, New Zealand 5, then there's the Anglophone African nations, plus a lot of the Carribbean. Nigeria on its own likely has 100 million native speakers of English

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InsideOutSanta 12 hours ago

As I've said, you can't just sum up populations. About 20% of the US population are immigrants. A lot of them won't speak English as their native language.
Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language.
I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.

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- permo-w 12 hours ago
  
  I'd like to see their working for that number. Let's say we subtract 20% from Canada + the UK + the US, we get ~320 million. add Nigeria and Uganda and you have easily 400 million. That's without Australia, Ireland, New Zealand or any of the African or Caribbean countries.
  
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  Retric 12 hours ago
  
  > You have easily 400 million
  No you don’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Nigeria
  ~60 million people in Nigeria speak English out of 230 million people, but that 60 million isn’t almost exclusively native speakers.
  
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  InsideOutSanta 12 hours ago
  
  There aren't that many native English speakers in Nigeria and Uganda. To me, it looks like your back-of-the-envelope calculation will come pretty close to 400 million.
  
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bilbo0s 12 hours ago

Have you been to Nigeria?
Not all Nigerians can speak English. But there are a lot who can. It honestly felt about 50/50 to me. And I see some other commenters saying that 60 million Nigerians have some ability to speak it. (But you need to think of that like if I was to say 60 million Americans have some ability to speak Spanish.)
However, even for those with some facility with English,I don't know that I'd classify it as their native language.

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