> For who? UK users?
Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.
Also, TikTok is banned in India and—ironically—China [1].
Of that 1/3 (of the global population) a significant percentage have extremely limited skills, though the threshold is above knowing a few random words.
wikipedia. You are a bit off...
As for native you have US+UK+Canada+Australia+NZ+Ireland. So more then your 380M.
Where does it state this?
Do you assume that all immigrants are non-native english speakers?
There are also some native born Americans to immigrants who also don’t have English as their first language and People born in China whose first language is English, but that’s ever smaller refinements on a specific estimate.
> ~47 million Americans aren’t native English speakers having immigrated from a non English speaking country.
Your link says 46M total which includes native speakers. So it does not state how many non-native speakers. (not that it would matter as most would be proficient english speakers, just pointing out you're exagerating and your numbers are wrong)
“About 47.8 million immigrants in 2023” https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-...
As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.
Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language.
I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.
No you don’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Nigeria
~60 million people in Nigeria speak English out of 230 million people, but that 60 million isn’t almost exclusively native speakers.
Not all Nigerians can speak English. But there are a lot who can. It honestly felt about 50/50 to me. And I see some other commenters saying that 60 million Nigerians have some ability to speak it. (But you need to think of that like if I was to say 60 million Americans have some ability to speak Spanish.)
However, even for those with some facility with English,I don't know that I'd classify it as their native language.
1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
US, UK, Canada, Australia is where you find the bulk of native speakers. In say Germany or whatever they may become fluent but it’s relatively rare for German parents to be speaking English to each other in casual conversation next to an infant’s crib.
Not how a lingua franca works.
There are 1.5 to 2 billion English speakers [1]. By far the largest number of people to speak a single language. Most of them are in America [2]. (If you count English learners, No. 2 is China [3].)
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today/articl...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236986651_The_stati...
first language = A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/pages/stat/default.a...
> Plurality of the world ... speak English
Sorry, what point are you trying to make?
While that has consistently been their point, it's also wrong.
Their bar for "speaking English" is "Native Language". Absolutely no one uses that as a bar when talking about how many people can consume content in $LANGUAGE.
> 1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
1/3 of the population speaks English “at all” (by which they mean speaking fluently, not learning) and 380 million people (roughly 5% of the population) is native.
Not trying to throw shade at anyone but it’s really... not hard for a reader to pause a little when one reads something that sounds wrong; it’s possible the reader misread. It’s even in the guidelines under different words:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There was a lot of failure to follow to this guideline in this comment thread.
But this number is dubious as it's largely from self response. Here [2] is a list by country. So 25% of Thais, 50% of Ukrainians, 50% of Poles, and so on "speak English."
In the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true. But "my name is Bob" maketh not a common tongue. If we narrowed it down to the percent of people that could hold a basic conversation, the number would plummet precipitously, likely leaving Mandarin at the top.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
70% of Chinese speak Mandarin as a first language [1].
> the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true
This is English learners. If you count English learners, a third of Chinese speak English and a majority of the internet-connected world.
China's also been pushing Mandarin lately and claim 85%.
...
> there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
So? Having only 1/3 of the planet speak English natively is not the same as 2/3 of the planet not speaking English at all.
That country’s creators belong to the largest native-speaking bloc of the most-commonly spoken language (native or not) in the world.