How many people speak English in the World?

Did you know that there are approximately 7.8 billion people on Earth? If we look around ourselves, we might get the impression that almost everyone speaks the English language. Yet, that is not true. In reality, only 4.9% of people around the world speak the English language. Such is the wide variety of languages spoken globally. Granted, English is the official language of communication and business correspondence across the world, it is the first language of only a small number of countries. As a result, it has opted as an official language in a few countries. Nevertheless, it is interesting to find how many people actually speak the English language and how many English speaking countries there are in the world.

At present, there are approximately?1348 million English speakers in the world. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that businesses are striving to get their content translated into the English language. For that, they take the help of?professional translation services?and translation companies.

Before we explore the countries where the English language is spoken, let’s take a look at a brief history of the English language and how it originated.

The English language—A Brief History

A member of the Germanic language family, English originally descended from Proto-Germanic. On the other hand, other languages which descended from Proto-Germanic include German, Swedish and Dutch, along with 43 other Germanic languages. Furthermore, English is an?Indo-European language—the largest language family in the world.

The English language essentially originated in Britain and the ever-expanding British Empire led to its spread throughout the world. In fact, historical language experts trace back the origin of the English language to the fifth century. This was the time when Germanic tribes invaded Britain. As a result of the invasion, the languages intermingled to form Old English. This intermingling of languages eventually gave way to Middle English.

English started to become more standardized during the medieval era. The British Empire was actually credited with the real spread of the language. As this empire invaded regions around the world, it took English with it, thus spreading it far and wide.

Today, English is spoken by over 1 billion people around the globe. It can be said that there are two main factors that actually contributed to the evolution towards Modern English. Firstly, the advent of printing in the 16th?century gave way to the mass production of the language. In the next century, the spellings of the words became standardized and words began to travel further around the world. Secondly, the colonialism and imperialism of the British Empire led to the imposition of the English language in the invaded territories. Interestingly, when this Empire was coming to a close, it was replaced with American Imperialism which made English as widespread as we witness it today.

The English Language—Spread and Usage

Despite the official number of almost 1 billion English speakers around the globe, it is actually hard to define exactly how many people speak English. However, before we explore the answer to the question of?how many people speak English in the world, let’s define what it actually means for a country to be “English speaking”.

There are approximately 18 countries where a majority of the population speaks English as a?native language. Examples include countries such as Australia and the Bahamas. However, this number is far from the total number, as it does not include countries where English is the official language but not the primary spoken language. In fact, more than 50 countries have English as an official language but in many of them, not everyone speaks the language in day-to-day life.

Then comes the?de facto?language. De facto means that English is the primary language of daily life in these countries, but is not formally listed as the official language. For example, the US has English as its de facto language but does not have an official language of its own.

Finally, there are many countries where English is spoken as a minor language. This means that only a minority of the population speaks it or it is used in certain areas only, such as in academics and business meetings.

This all seems quite confusing, which is why we have compiled a list of English speaking countries. Let’s take a look at the countries and their continents.

（from CCJK blog）