Only about 6% of the world's population are native English speakers, and 75% of people don't speak English at all. Many people do not have access to high-quality health information, because it is not available in a language that they understand.
Current research suggests that the English language is now spoken by approximately 1.35 billion people worldwide. That's 17% of the world's population. But at what age do children around the world start learning English? And how much do people value this widely spoken language in 2022?
Out of the world's approximately 7.8 billion inhabitants, 1.35 billion speak English. The majority aren't native English speakers, however. About 360 million people speak English as their first language. The most common first language is Chinese, followed distantly by Spanish and then, in third, comes English.
What percentage of the US speaks English? According to the latest census data, over 91% of people in the US speak English very well. 8.2% of people do not speak English “very well”, though this statistic doesn't mean that they are completely non-English speakers.
If you find the British accent difficult to understand, it's likely you'll find the Aussie accent even harder to grasp as, for the most part, Australia is a melting pot of all the different regional dialects of British English.
New Zealand. The New Zealand accent is most similar to Australian accents (particularly those of Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia) but is distinguished from these accents by the presence of three "clipped" vowels, slightly resembling South African English.
In Australia, 22.3% of people spoke a language other than English at home in 2021. Australia's language statistics show the proportion of the population who speak a language at home other than English.
There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in communication. Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now.
English is the world's most widely spoken language but is unusual in the fact that the vast majority of speakers are not 'native'. Of the approximately 1.5 billion people who speak English, less than 400 million use it as a first language. That means over 1 billion speak it as a secondary language.
This is because English is the world's lingua franca or common second language, as this table shows. English is the international language of business, commerce, science, medicine, and many other key areas. Even in diplomacy, where French once ruled supreme, English is now dominant in most regions of the world.
The rise of the English language is largely down to the rise of the British Empire. After developing in the British Isles, English was spread across the world via trade! In fact, one of the main goals of the British Empire was trade (buying and selling goods).
They found that in the digital age, English (and other languages) add new words at a rate that is higher than that of any other analyzed time period. However, the rate at which words are disappearing from our language (the death rate) is greater than the rate at which they are appearing (the birth rate).
These include China, The Gambia, Malawi, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Algeria, Uganda, Yemen, Chile and Tanzania. We also used the EF English Proficiency Index, which ranks countries according to their English language proficiency.
As of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Most of these are minor languages in danger of extinction; one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050.
The English language will likely not stop changing around us
English will adapt to making sense of the new trends, even if those changes do result in it going through an evolution of how we spell things and communicate.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
The Aussie accent started with kids
It's important to remember that the Aboriginal people had been using their own languages for thousands of years before the Europeans came to Australia so English was a foreign language to them.
While indigenous Australians had developed over 250 different languages at the time of European colonisation, non-indigenous Australians simply haven't been around long enough to develop regional accents. And as an English-speaking immigrant population, it was their common language that bound them together.
Let's face it, most of us are suckers for a sexy accent. According to a recent survey conducted by the popular dating website MissTravel.com, over 2000 American men and women regard Australian accents as one of the sexiest in the world.
In Australia, this dialect is sometimes called Strine /ˈstɹɑɪn/ (or "Strayan" /ˈstɹæɪən/, a shortening of the word Australian), and a speaker of the dialect may be referred to as an Ocker.
Australians have an accent that is often confused with New Zealand's dulcet tones. However, for those in the know, they are as distinct as Canadian and American accents. Kiwis have a tendency to flatten their vowels, and Aussies have more of a nasally twang.
The most widely accepted theory to why Australians have the accent they do is that the first Australian born children (of the colonizers, not the natives obviously) simply created the first trace of the recognizable accent amongst themselves naturally.