English Today

Table of Contents - March 2008 - Volume 24, Issue 01  

Original Article

Two thousand million?

David Crystal

ABSTRACT

Updates on the statistics of English. Starting with excerpt from David Crystal, How many millions use English? (ET1, 1985). The author says: Reading this article again, that almost a quarter of a century on, the most noticeable change, it seems to me, has been in the amount and colour of the author's hair! That aside, I am struck by my final comment: ‘I shall stay with this figure for a while’ – a billion. It appears I stayed with it for a decade. In the first edition of my English as a Global Language (1997: 61) I raised my estimate, suggesting a middle-of-the-road figure of 1,350 million. In the second edition (2003: 69), a ‘cautious temperament’, I said, would suggest 1,500 million. And these days, having read the more sophisticated assessments by David Graddol and others, I am prepared to revise upwards again in the direction of 2 billion. In short, we have moved in 25 years from a fifth to a quarter to a third of the world's population being speakers of English.

BIODATA

DAVID CRYSTAL is freelance writer and editor, and Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor, North Wales.