How many English-speakers are in the world?

How many English-speakers are in the world?

It is very difficult to say. One of the reasons is the minimum level to add people. For example

1. There are 500 million speakers if you only include mother tongue speakers and bilingual people.

2. You can add other 500 million as medium level speakers.

3. Finally, you can add other 500 million if you want to include basic level speakers.

If we are serious you can't include the last group (3). But what about the second group?

In the stockt market there's an expression that says "the trend is your friend". And the trend is clearly on the English side as to become overwhelming towards other languages.

Lets say children in china will learn English in few years now, add SA kids too. Than your number 2 and 3 would jump something like 300M each. Noone can say what the world will be in 100 years time, but unless dramatic happens almost everyone on this planet will be included on your number 3, not to say 2.

<<And the trend is clearly on the English side as to become overwhelming towards other languages.>>

Isn't the general consensus that English will decline in importance in the future, as the US (and the rest of the West, too) fades away to insignificance?

<<Isn't the general consensus that English will decline in importance in the future, as the US (and the rest of the West, too) fades away to insignificance?>>

Nope, it'll keep on increasing. You're no "prognosticator," that's for sure.

No one knows how many. It's impossible to know the true numbers, but there are a number of theories or estimates as to how many English speakers there are. Some of the difficulties:

1. Can't survey everyone
2. Measurements testing knowledge of English are not always valid nor reliable
3. People can lie (meaning they know little or no English)
4. In some of the estimates they count people with mental retardation (some groups don't reach the required number of vocabulary)

It is more important than you think. For example, if we are stricter and we only consider the native and bilingual speakers, we have only 500 million speakers.

That is an important problem for English, because it will be only 5th, after Chinese, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic. So, if English want to have a better place, they need to add all medium level speakers.

There is a similar problem with French, but with smaller figures.

Hopefully now that America has a Kenyan president, we will see the status of English decline.

Да ты прав, Обама - тайный агент российской спецслужбы. Он будет содействовать возвращению СССР.

Да. План работает очень наилучшим образом.

It is spoken by many people.

Да, Обама уже сделал первый шаг к укреплению СССР. Тем временем как все обсуждали выборы, Медведев заявлял о увеличении презедентских сроков от 4 до 6 лет!