Adam L.,
Where are you getting your information?
I probably shouldn't even both with this, but I'd love to hear your "logic" behind this hypothesis of yours.
One other thing, is it bad that 25 million rhotic speakers are Canadian?
By the way, there were only about 18 million english speakers in Canada in 1996, and the total population has only increased by about, maybe 1 million since then.
Excellent work Jim, excellent.
Thank you, .., thank you. However, I've not really done a very good job on the calculation front. Of course, rounding the product off to the nearest interger might seem to make sense because because you can't have 0.28 of a person (even if they are Canadian) but this is actually not valid. I really should have rounded it off to three significant figures because the percentage given was no more precise than this. So here's the better answer.
19.3 million
Where has that Adam L. got to? I thought sure that he would be back here with the details of his hypothesis in order to defend his good name. Alas, perhaps I was wrong.
Jim:
I´m not sure about that phonetics you described in ´drawing´. Though i think that´s well possible... I would say ´drO:<i>N´
But I guess you´re right.