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1.8billion English speakers:valid source? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Veedo Newbie United States Joined 5422 days ago 12 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 7 18 June 2011 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm just curious on your opinion about this. In 2007 there was some kind of
highschoolish research paper posted on the Internet that haphazardly claimed there are 1.8 billion English speakers, "about 400 million of them being native speakers" (emphasis mine). It's no longer hosted directly but you can find it in a web archive here: http://classic-web.archive.org/web/20070401233529/http://www .ehistling- pub.meotod.de/01_lec06.php The author appears to be some kind of German professor and he might have been using this material in some of his classes. There are no sources stating where he got his information but this one reference has been used around the Internet, most notably on wikipedia, and is being taken as fact. I could be wrong but it seems like this number was pretty much made up and probably isn't true. It just smells kind of fishy to me. Do any of you have any idea where this number could have originally come from or is it just this one guy who basically made it up himself? Edited by Veedo on 18 June 2011 at 4:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 7 18 June 2011 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do you think the number of speakers is higher or lower than 1.8 billions?
Ethnologue has more info (although somewhat out of date). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Veedo Newbie United States Joined 5422 days ago 12 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 7 18 June 2011 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would say lower. Every other figure is much lower than 1.8 billion. The link you gave
appears to be actual data derived from the real world... the 1.8 billion figure appears to be a number made up by a single guy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ygangerg Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5319 days ago 100 posts - 140 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, French Studies: German | Message 4 of 7 07 July 2011 at 10:31am | IP Logged | ||
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400 million-plus native speakers seems reasonable if you consider the amount of people in the largest English-speaking countries (300,000,000 U.S.) (60,000,000 GB) (30,000,000 Canada) (20,000,000 Australia). Sorry to anyone I left out (New Zealand, etc.) but we're already at a count of 410,000,000 here.
And plus, Ethnologue in the link from jeff_lindqvist can usually give you a ballpark. That said, I would not at all be surprised if the number of people with a working knowledge of English were to be approaching 2 billion. 1.8 seems as good a guess as any. Take a look at this very forum, for example. I wonder what percentage of the members are not native speakers of English? Edited by Ygangerg on 07 July 2011 at 10:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ygangerg Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5319 days ago 100 posts - 140 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, French Studies: German | Message 5 of 7 07 July 2011 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||
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In any case, though, I don't know whence this guy produced the number 1.8 billion. His references seem a bit skimpy...
I wonder how many English speakers there really are on the globe? Then again, estimating foreign language speakers would seem, to me, even more monstrous a task than counting native speakers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 7 07 July 2011 at 11:27am | IP Logged | ||
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In many countries English is an official language, and this includes populous ones like India and Nigeria. This certainly doesn't mean that everybody speaks the language, but it adds to the confusion.
I found one unofficial survey of English skills in about forty countries here, and there are numerous other sources - but as long as claimed skills aren't tested those surveys are of dubious value. In the EU a survey from 2006 showed that 38% of the population knew English as a secondary language (we have discussed the criteria somewhere on this forum), so that alone would give around 300 mio. speakers (not counting UK and Ireland). In some other countries everybody who have been through some kind of higher education must have learned English because only primary school uses the indigenous languages. In India some sources claim that just 1% really can speak English, while others claim far higher numbers. It's a jungle out there. Edited by Iversen on 07 July 2011 at 11:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 7 07 July 2011 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||
They've got deserts, mountains and farmland too, you know. :-p 1 person has voted this message useful |
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