SultanOfSwing

I think that 360 million only refers to those for whom English is a first language, but once you add in all the non-native speakers, considering how widespread it is as a second language, you're probably up around that 700 million that I had so spectacularly incorrectly remembered earlier

Bipat

I think statistics in Wikipedia regarding English language speakers are bound to be more complicated than at first sight. It depends how you define "speakers".

Probably all the figures guessed at in the above posts are accurate for India!!
It is a language of Government and certainly private schools and universities.
It is widely spoken officially in the southern states as a rebellion against the imposition of Hindi as the official national language.

But the number who actually use English as a first language at home/in the family is estimated probably just in the 200 thousands. But this may also be inaccurate many use a mixture even in one sentence

Pulaski

That sounds plausible, but I suspect very conservative. Given the size of the populations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria alone, (aggregate over 1.75 billion! ), even a fairly small percentage speaking English in those four countries could add a couple of hundred million to the total.

Pulaski

I used to work with a number of Indians in a business that had many Indian clients and it was interesting listening to a non-English conversation, because it seemed as if just about any western object, machine, or concept had been absorbed into the language as an English word, much as English absorbs words from other languages. So sentences often contained multiple English words in a matrix of an Indian language.

kodokan

I used to live in Shropshire just by the border with Wales, and would occasionally pick up some Welsh language radio in the car. I noticed the same thing there - a string of Welsh words with 'television' and 'computer' in the middle of them. But the one that really fascinated me one day was 'world'. I suppose at the time when Wales was a self-contained country/language, it didn't have this concept, so didn't need a word for it.

robin1234

All true, but my point (partly) was that the Wikipedia article (apparently based on data from a Swedish encyclopedia published in 2007) is more inclusive for the Spanish language than for English. If you go to the links for countries that have respectively Spanish and English as an official language, the entire populations of Ecuador, Bolivia etc. are counted as Spanish speaking, but the populations of Nigeria, Pakistan etc. are NOT counted into the English speaking total...

Welshgator

Y byd - The World.

Used to sing a very old song in Welsh when I was young which contains the words 'Y byd'. You'd be wrong about not having a concept of the world too. Given Wales' very ancient history of trading with European countries, dating way back before the Romans began building castles in Wales.

scrubbedexpat091

But not everyone in the US and Canada (not sure about NZ) speaks English, so can't exactly use the whole population of the country to count how many speak English, obviously most do, but its not 100% in either country.

Then if talking about primary or native language there is Quebec where for many Canadian French is their primary and native Language.

Pulaski

I forgot about Quebec. I would doubt that more than a tiny percentage of the US population speaks anything other than English at home - some of the Hispanics and probably a fair number of Chinese. I doubt it is more than 5% of the population overall. ..... But in any case education in the US is delivered almost exclusively in English, and perhaps it is the delivery of education that is a good test for "how much English is spoken" in any given country? ..... I move to include half the populations of the Netherlands and Denmark as "English speaking".

jeepster

Calling a male Pole a male Pole is not an ethnic slur. You're referring to a bygone age.

kodokan

Interesting, thanks. I wonder, then, why they used 'world' in the broadcast, if there's a perfectly good Welsh word? It was used by itself, not as part of a proper noun like World Bank.

*musing* I don't suppose any people from any country pre, say, 1000 CE, had a concept of 'world' in the same way we do now. They would have known of, and visited, other countries, but would have no notion of the entire globe. I wonder what Welsh speakers of 1000+ years ago had in their heads when they said 'Y byd'? It's certainly not going to be the green and blue ball pictured from space or Mercator-projected wall map image that we might call to mind.

Pulaski

Some of the translation web sites seem to indicate that byd is used for "planet" and "globe" and possibly a few other things such as "circumstances", presumably a simiar concept to "context", so "byd" does not appear to be a 1:1 equivalent to "world".

kodokan

Well, that seems odd - I highly doubt anyone in pre-Roman times was using a word that meant planet or globe. I guess it's the translation software taking the modern usage, not how it would have been used way back then.

History and linguistics are frustrating at times.

Pulaski

On the contrary, mankind has had an awareness of the planets, notably our neighbours Venus ans Mars, and also mercury and Saturn, since prehistoric times.

SultanOfSwing

And Jupiter ...

Planet itself is from the Ancient Greek aster planetes, or 'wandering star' so they've certainly been known at least in antiquity, but as you suggested long before recorded history as well.