World Languages - Countries A to G - Internet World Stats. Internet World Stats - Usage and Population Statistics. Social Media Revolution. Mobile Stats Video - Mobilenomics | @equalman. Submarine Cable Map. Top Ten Internet Languages - World Internet Statistics. Tallying the number of speakers of the world's languages is an increasingly complex task, particularly with the push in many countries to teach English in their public schools. How many people can actually use the global language? David Graddol estimated a total of 750 million L1 (first or native language) plus L2 (second or nth language) speakers of English in his Future of English Report (pdf document) for the British Council.
One of our subscribers, Prof. Martin Schell, has reviewed Prof. Braj Kachru's new book Asian Englishes which claims that India and China combined have over half a billion "users" of English. Indeed, many people are bilingual or multilingual, but here we assign only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach).