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del.icio.us| COMMENTARY |
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lukem 5th December 2004 |
The simple answer would be it was the language of the British empire, then as it receeded, it remained a lingua franca. Now American cultural and economic dominance would be ensuring its continued importance. |
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Emmanuel Chukwu 11th February 2005 |
Kindly update your data on the population of English speakers in Nigeria. For over one Million Students wrote the 2002 JAMB exam while English Language is compulsory. Imagine the population of English speakers across all strata of education in Nigeria |
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Chris 11th April 2005 |
I was expecting to find the Philippines somewhere on top of this list. In several books that I have read, the Philippines has the second-largest English speaking population in the world. Also, I'm guessing that it's statistically impossible that only 35,000+ out of 87 million Filipinos (less than 1%) could speak English when it is used as the medium of instruction in the Philippines. |
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Ian Graham Staff Editor 12th April 2005 |
If you combine the number of mother tongue speakers (32,802) and second-language speakers of English (52 percent of the population) given here for the Philippines, you get a total of about 44 million English speakers in the country, more than all but the top two countries on this list. There may be more English speakers than that in the Philippines, but they may not have identified theie mother tongue as English in the census, which could explain why the number of English speakers given for the Philippines is so low. |
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Pedro 11th July 2005 |
As far as I know Philippines is the third largest English speaking country (http://wikitravel.org/en/Philippines#Talk). I might be wrong but I'm sure that 32,802 is far less than the actual English speakers in the country. |
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blouis@clemson.edu 22nd November 2005 |
Why is the number of English speakers in India left out of your statistics? I would like to know the current number please. |
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Per Ulv 25th February 2006 |
This is the number of people who have english as their FIRST LANGUAGE. Of course people almost all over the educated world understands and is able to speak english more or less. |
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Paul 1st April 2006 |
With reference to comments by previous correspondants, if the origin of the data is from National censuses the 2.6m english speakers attributed to Ireland would appear to reflect the position in the 1961 census, when the population of the country was 2,818,381 (see http://www.cso.ie/census/documents/vol1_t1_4.pdf). The 2002 census gave the population as 3.9m (2006 projection: 4.2m)at least 3.7m of which (allowing for foreign nationals and irish speakers) are native english speakers. If deduction is made for Irish speakers confusion may arise between the number of persons who have the ability to speak Irish (2002: 1.02m) and those who speak it daily (2002:320k) http://www.cso.ie/census/documents/vol11_entire.pdf. Even so, with about 3.9 english speakers, I would not expect Ireland in the top 20 english speaking countries by population. |
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Roberto Cervantes 11th April 2006 |
In regards with India being an English speaking country, I think people living in the United States "suffer" it every day when we have to call AMEX, or Citibank, and our calls are answered in India. It's is very frustrating and sometimes they are impossible to understand. Even though many of them speak an outstanding English, they obviously speak English as a second language, and some of them don't actually speak English, although they think they do. Should they all be counted as English speakers? |
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XcLusiveGTtriLLa (Jersey City, NJ) 19th July 2006 |
There are many other english speaking nations missing here, there are 751,000 english speakers in Guyana and 1,205,000 english speakers in Trinidad and Tobago. |
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George (Canada) 4th August 2006 |
It's hard to believe some countries don't have any people with English as a 1st language. |
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Alex 8th October 2006 |
I think the data is based on censes which asked for primary language only. That could explain India's "0". But India isn't zero now, so Singapore's should be updated too. Nearly EVERYONE in Singapore speak fluent English. |
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Venkat (Bloomington,IL) 19th January 2007 |
As per Census 2006, the number of english speaking population in India is over 350 Million |
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Marjon ((Philippines)) 1st February 2007 |
This data is totally absurd! How come only 32thou out of 87 millions Filipino they claim can speak English. If these researchers where to go to our country they will be fascinated that even a kindergarten child in our country can comprehend English. Maybe their data where dated before the age of man. |
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AJ (Ireland) 24th August 2007 |
The population of the republic of Ireland is over 4 million!! Apart from the >100,000 eastern europeans, many of whom speak good English, the rest are fluent!! Where did the 2.6m figure come from, the pop of Ireland has been that low in over 40 years! |
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Jen (Philippines) 8th October 2007 |
I don't think it's possible than only 32 thousand people from the Philippines can speak English. Is the 32 802 MILLION instead of thousand? Please update this information. |
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