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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.
A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language, or language family. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas . The earliest such atlas was the Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches of Georg Wenker and Ferdinand Wrede, published ...
Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca, [62] [132] is also regarded as the first world language. [133] [134] English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. [134]
Most states where English is an official language are former territories of the British Empire . Exceptions include Rwanda and Burundi [also should be on map], which were formerly German and then Belgian colonies; Cameroon, where only part of the country was under the British mandate; and Liberia, the Philippines, the Federated States of ...
The notions of World English and World Englishes are far from similar, although the terms are often mistakenly [citation needed] used interchangeably. World English refers to the English language as a lingua franca used in business, trade, diplomacy and other spheres of global activity, while World Englishes refers to the different varieties of English and English-based creoles developed in ...
424 – 400 (Very low) below 400 (Very low) No data or national language. The EF English Proficiency Index ( EF EPI) attempts to rank countries by the equity of English language skills amongst those adults who took the EF test. [ 2] It is the product of EF Education First, an international education company, and draws its conclusions from data ...
International English is the concept of using the English language as a global means of communication similar to an international auxiliary language, and often refers to the movement towards an international standard for the language. [1] Related and sometimes synonymous terms include: Global English, World English, Common English, Continental ...
Language family. A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy.