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English-speaking countries


Pie chart showing the percentage of native English speakers living in "inner circle" English-speaking countries. Native speakers are now substantially outnumbered worldwide by second-language speakers of English (not counted in this chart).

Approximately 330 to 360 million people speak English as their first language. More than half of these (231 million) live in the United States, followed by some 55 million in England, the first place where English was spoken.

English is the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish.

Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly, from 470 million to more than 1 billion. David Crystal calculates that non-native speakers as of 2003 outnumbered native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. When combining native and non-native speakers, English is the most widely spoken language worldwide.

Besides the major varieties of English, such as American English, British English, Indian English, Canadian English, Australian English, Irish English, New Zealand English and their sub-varieties, countries such as South Africa, the Philippines, Jamaica and Nigeria also have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from English-based creole languages to Standard English.


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