World Languages: a Response

Maire the Red has suggested that Spanish has more native speakers than English. This may be true, although from looking over various statistics I think it is the other way around. This site has some statistics. You'll notice that the first chart, by Weber, shows English as having the most native speakers, at about 332 million. This is contradicted by other charts which show English at about 322 million. Since The Economist's yearbook of statistics for 2005 show the major English speaking countries (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and Us) as having combined populations of 378.5 million it is clear that there must be well over 340 million today, even allowing for 10% of these nations not speaking English, which is probably too high.

Other countries where English is co-official, such as India, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa and Zimbabwe have a combined population of 1,632,200 million, but only a minority would speak English. All of the above charts, however, number the number of speakers of English as a secondary language at 150,000 million, giving total world wide speakers of English as 480 million, well above any estimate of Spanish speakers.

As for immigrants learning English, and Joey's comment, I will get to that soon.