How many people speak English in the world?

English is the world's most widely spoken language but is unusual in the fact that the vast majority of speakers are not 'native'. Of the approximately 1.5 billion people who speak English, less than 400 million use it as a first language. That means over 1 billion speak it as a secondary language.
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What percentage of world speaks English?

His numbers are surprising, compared with the ones featured in the CIA's Factbook. According to the CIA, Spanish is spoken by 4.85 percent of the world's population and its use is even more widespread than English, which is spoken by 4.83 percent.
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What percentage of the world speaks English 2021?

Roughly 13% of the world speaks the English language. While less than 5% speaks English natively, the number of people who speak English as a second language make it one of the most widely spoken people in the world.
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Will English become the only language?

English will most likely not become the dominant world language as more people speak more than one language, a language expert reports. The world faces a future of people speaking more than one language, with English no longer seen as likely to become dominant, a British language expert says in a new analysis.
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Does 75% of the world's population speak English?

94% of the world's population does not speak English as their first language. 75% do not speak English at all. Studying a foreign language develops your oral and written skills – even in your native language.
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How Many People Speak English? | By The Numbers



Is English hard to learn?

The Difficulty of Learning to Speak English

English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, especially compared to many of the Romance languages like Spanish and French.
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Do most Chinese speak English?

According to some estimates, fewer than 10 million Chinese, or less than 1% of the population, speak English. In Hong Kong, a special administrative region, English is an official language; about 50% of the population speak it, though most in that category would not consider themselves fluent.
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Does Japan speak English?

Yet despite this growth, studies estimate that less than 30 percent of Japanese speak English at any level at all. Less than 8 percent and possibly as little as 2 percent speak English fluently.
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Do Russian speak English?

Only 5% of Russians speak English and Russia's overall English language proficiency is still ranked as 'Low' in the international English Proficiency Index (EF EPI).
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Do Indians speak English?

Only a few hundred thousand Indians, or less than 0.1% of the total population, spoke English as their first language, and around 30% of the Indian population can speak English to some extent.
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What's the easiest language?

15 of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers - ranked
  • Frisian. Frisian is thought to be one of the languages most closely related to English, and therefore also the easiest for English-speakers to pick up. ...
  • Dutch. ...
  • Norwegian. ...
  • Spanish. ...
  • Portuguese. ...
  • Italian. ...
  • French. ...
  • Swedish.
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What's the hardest language?

1. Mandarin. As mentioned before, Mandarin is unanimously considered the toughest language to master in the world! Spoken by over a billion people in the world, the language can be extremely difficult for people whose native languages use the Latin writing system.
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Why is English so popular?

Some of the reasons for the English Language's popularity today include: The rise of the British Empire and The United States, developments within the science and technology industries, and the fact the English Language is gender free, among a number of other reasons.
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What is the top 10 most spoken language in the world?

The most spoken languages in the world
  1. English (1,132 million speakers) Native speakers: 379 million. ...
  2. Mandarin (1,117 million speakers) ...
  3. Hindi (615 million speakers) ...
  4. Spanish (534 million speakers) ...
  5. French (280 million speakers) ...
  6. Arabic (274 million speakers) ...
  7. Bengali (265 million speakers) ...
  8. Russian (258 million speakers)
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Which country speaks the best English?

The Netherlands has emerged as the nation with the highest English language proficiency, according to the EF English Proficiency Index, with a score of 72. It is ahead of five other northern European nations at the top of the chart. In fact, the only non-European nation in the top ten is Singapore at number six.
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Can a child learn 3 languages at once?

What we know is that children can learn multiple languages at once, and the benefits of being bilingual are endless. Learning multiple languages from birth is not a new phenomenon either. In fact, raising multilingual children is more common than most people think.
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What is the 3rd hardest language to learn?

3. Japanese Comes In The List Of Top 10 Hardest Languages To Learn. Belonging to the top 10 hardest languages to learn, Japanese is more comfortable speaking compared to Mandarin, but what makes it exist in this list? Japanese has a wide range of alphabets that need to be learned before writing in this language.
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Why English is the hardest language?

The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.
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What's the fastest language to learn?

1. Norwegian. This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
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What language is closest to English?

The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
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What is best language to learn?

The 7 Best Languages To Learn
  • Spanish. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language after Mandarin and certainly not a surprise at the top of languages to learn. ...
  • German. Germany has the highest GDP in Europe, and many are flocking to the country seeking new careers. ...
  • Arabic. ...
  • Mandarin. ...
  • Portuguese. ...
  • Russian. ...
  • French.
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Who invented English?

Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English today is a constantly changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and languages, such as Latin, French, Dutch, and Afrikaans.
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Is British or American English better?

In the main, British English and American English are very similar, even with differences in spelling. In today's world, American spelling is probably winning thanks to Microsoft's spell checker. There are vocabulary differences and some can cause embarrassing situations if you only know one flavour.
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