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The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total English-speaking population of the European Union and the United Kingdom combined (2012) is 256,876,220 [69] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [70] i.e. 51%) including 65,478,252 native speakers and 191,397,968 non-native speakers, and would be ranked 2nd if it were included.
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 United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, where the overwhelming majority of native English speakers reside, do not have English as an official language de jure, but English is considered their de facto official language because it dominates in these countries. [citation needed]
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties , such as Arabic , Lahnda , Persian , Malay , Pashto , and Chinese .
Varieties of English learned by non-native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. [82] Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries, [ 82 ] and they may show grammatical ...
Thus, the percentage of English speakers is expected to rise. Euro English or European English, less commonly known as EU English and EU Speak, is a dialect of English based on the technical jargon of the European Union and the native languages of its non-native English speaking population.
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [2] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
Chief among other native English dialects are Canadian English and Australian English, which rank third and fourth in the number of native speakers. [4] For the most part, Canadian English, while featuring numerous British forms, alongside indigenous Canadianisms, shares vocabulary, phonology and syntax with American English, which leads many ...