How many people in the world speak English as a first a native language? Exact information on
this point is not available, but an estimate of 230 million cannot be very wide of the mark. Of
these, 145 million live the United States, a little less than 55 million in the United Kingdom,
and something like 30 million in the British dominions and colonial possessions. It is even more
difficult to arrive at a figure representing those who speak English as a second or auxiliary
language. A reasonably conservative conclusion would thus place the total number of speakers of
English between 300 million and 325 million, about one seventh of the world’s population.
If one thinks solely in terms of total number of speakers, it must be conceded that some
authorities place Chinese, the various Indic languages, and Russian ahead of English, others only
Chinese. Both Chinese and Indic, however, are terms covering a large number of mutually
unintelligible dialects; and though the number of speakers of these languages may seem
impressive, communication within the language is much more restricted than in English. Total
numbers, moreover, constitute but one phase of the matter. The factor of geographical
distribution is equally, possibly even more, significant. English is spoken as a first or native
language on at least four continents of the world, Russian on two, Chinese and the Indic language
on one, English is without question the closest approach to a world language today. It goes
without saying that no two persons ever have an identical command of their common language.
Certainly they have not precisely the same vocabulary. There are at least minor differences in
pronunciation: indeed the same individual will not pronounce his vowels and consonants in
absolutely identical fashion every time he utters them. Everyone possesses in addition certain
individual traits of grammatical form and syntactical order, constituting that peculiar and
personal quality of language which we term style. All of this is implicit in the well-known
phrase, “Style is the man”. No two men are identical; no two styles are the same. If this is
true of but two persons, the potential of difference resident in a language spoken by more than
200 million truly staggers the imagination.