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Comment by shortrounddev2 | Hacker News Reader

As their first language, perhaps

There are only about 400 million native English speakers. You can't just add up the population of English speaking countries, because that excludes immigrants living in these countries, and people born there who did not learn English as their first language.

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.

IMO first-or-not is moot. It’s estimated that around one billion people speak English to a reasonably fluent level. Included in that is many of the commonwealth countries in which English often holds second spot as a lingua franca (eg. India). It’s an incredibly global language.

I don't think anyone disputes that it is an incredibly global language. I certainly don't.

this is horseshit. Canada, the US and the UK alone have - minimum - 400 million. Australia has 25 million, Ireland 5, New Zealand 5, then there's the Anglophone African nations, plus a lot of the Carribbean. Nigeria on its own likely has 100 million native speakers of English

As I've said, you can't just sum up populations. About 20% of the US population are immigrants. A lot of them won't speak English as their native language.

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.

I'd like to see their working for that number. Let's say we subtract 20% from Canada + the UK + the US, we get ~320 million. add Nigeria and Uganda and you have easily 400 million. That's without Australia, Ireland, New Zealand or any of the African or Caribbean countries.

There aren't that many native English speakers in Nigeria and Uganda. To me, it looks like your back-of-the-envelope calculation will come pretty close to 400 million.

> You have easily 400 million

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.

Have you been to Nigeria?

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.

That’s at all, there are only ~380 million native English speakers.

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.

> Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion

wikipedia. You are a bit off...

As for native you have US+UK+Canada+Australia+NZ+Ireland. So more then your 380M.

~47 million Americans aren’t native English speakers having immigrated from a non English speaking country.

Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_immigration_stat...

> aren’t native English speakers

Where does it state this?

Do you assume that all immigrants are non-native english speakers?

By coming from different country their native language (IE what language they heard as infants) more closely resembles that country than America. Note I said 47 million and there are more than 47 million immigrants.

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.

[flagged]

You made this statement which is wrong:

> ~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)

Link is showing slightly outdated data as is common on Wikipedia, but the breakdown by country is what’s important.

“About 47.8 million immigrants in 2023” https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-...

My family immigrated. We’re native English speakers from India.

So immigration had zero impact on your family being a native English speaker. And again 47 < 47.8

[flagged]

The question of your native language is answered long before any of what you’re talking about here. A 20 year old isn’t time traveling to have different parents when they take an exam.

Who cares if they're native English speakers or not, as long as they can converse in the language?

shortrounddev2 who brought the topic up without knowing the numbers.

If they are native English speakers, then how do they have extremely limited skills?

I added clarification, but “that 1/3” refers to my prior mention of 1/3 as in 1/3 of the global population.

American education.

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