Global English

Although English is a language native to only about 8% of the world’s population, there are at least 400 million who speak it as a mother tongue and an estimated 750 million who are learning it!  It is spoken by more than 1.5 billion throughout the world including more than 100 million who use it as a second language.  It is an official or semi-official language in over 62 countries, it is spoken as a foreign language in more than 120 countries, and it is either dominant or well established in all six continents.  And within a few years, China will be the number 1 English-speaking country in the world.

As companies globalize and countries democratize or move toward the "New World Order" everyone feels the pressure to learn a common language.  And because of American economic, military, and political power, the spread of the US media and the prestige/notoriety of the United States, American English has become the natural choice.

A survey in 2004 by David Graddol of the Open University, used computer modelling to predict that by 2015 two billion people could be learning English as a second language, twice as many as in 2000. This compares with his earlier prediction, in the journal Science in May 2004, that the number of native English speakers will decline as a proportion of the world's population, from about 9% now to about 5% in 2050. If these predictions prove accurate, English may be a dead language like Latin in a few centuries  and a lingua franca for people with no other language in common.

In Europe, English has spread from the elite to blue-collar workers and to children and become Europe’s common language.  English has become more widely spoken and written than any language in history.

There are still more British sounding accents (Australia, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, South Africa) than American ones, but American pronunciations are often heard in modern British English.  Since the 1950s, General American English has influenced world English more than any other variety of English.