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As of 2024, there are 57 sovereign states and 28 non-sovereign entities where English is an official language. Many administrative divisions have declared English an official language at the local or regional level. Most states where English is an official language are former territories of the British Empire.
Spoken in: the southern area of the State of California, United States; Lunda – Chilunda Spoken in: Zambia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Luo – Kavirondo or Dholuo Spoken in: Kenya and Tanzania; Luri – لری or Lori Spoken in: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates
Standard English is often associated with the more educated layers of society as well as more formal registers. British and American English are the reference norms for English as spoken, written, and taught in the rest of the world, excluding countries in which English is spoken natively such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
English is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans. [71] The countries where English is spoken can be grouped into different categories according to how English is used in each country.
Many overseas Chinese populations in North America speak some variety of Chinese. In the United States and Canada, Chinese is the third most spoken language. [32] [33] [34] Yue dialects have historically been the most prevalent forms of Chinese due to immigrants being mostly from southern China from the 19th century up through the 1980s.
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, [1] [2] making it the largest language by number of speakers, the third largest language by number of native speakers and the most widespread language geographically.
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the city of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family .