The United States and India have the most total English speakers, with 283 million and 125 million, respectively. There are also 108 million in Pakistan, 79 million in Nigeria, and 64 million in the Philippines.
The Inner Circle — The smallest circle, this section includes countries in which English is the native language of the majority of the population: mainly the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and much of Canada.
English speaking countries
As a percentage of the total population, the largest share of around 100 percent is in the Bermudas. A total of about 411.8 million people worldwide speak English as their mother tongue.
These include China, The Gambia, Malawi, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Algeria, Uganda, Yemen, Chile and Tanzania. We also used the EF English Proficiency Index, which ranks countries according to their English language proficiency.
It is the country's common language and de facto national language; while Australia has no official language, English is the first language of the majority of the population, and has been entrenched as the de facto national language since European settlement, being the only language spoken in the home for 72% of ...
English originated in England and is the dominant language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th centuries.
People from Newcastle speak a dialect called Geordie, which is one of the strongest and most distinctive accents in England.
Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Through trade, invasions and conquest, the Aramaic language had spread far afield by the 7th century B.C., and would become the lingua franca in much of the Middle East.
The first people to call themselves English were predominantly descended from northern Europeans, a new study reveals. Over 400 years of mass migration from the northern Netherlands and Germany, as well as southern Scandinavia, provide the genetic basis of many English residents today.
Closest Major Language: Dutch
Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
The English largely descend from two main historical population groups: the West Germanic tribes, including the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians who settled in Southern Britain following the withdrawal of the Romans, and the partially Romanised Celtic Britons who already lived there.
In Australia, this dialect is sometimes called Strine /ˈstɹɑɪn/ (or "Strayan" /ˈstɹæɪən/, a shortening of the word Australian), and a speaker of the dialect may be referred to as an Ocker.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
The Australian accent is non-rhotic
The Australian accent is for the most part non-rhotic. This means that the pronunciation of the /r/ sound will never occur at the end of words. Where an American will say three separate sounds for the word car /kar/, an Australian native speaker will only say 2 /ka:/.
Option 1: the American accent
The most popular English accent of them all. Spread around the world by American cinema, music, television and more than 350 million North Americans (including Canadians, eh), this is the easiest accent for most people to understand, whether native speakers or non-native speakers.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
In the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were: English (33%) Australian (29.9%)
White British is an ethnicity classification used for the native white population identifying as English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Northern Irish, or British in the United Kingdom Census.