English-speaking world | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 11/11/2018

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
English-speaking world

Listening is a more natural way of learning, when compared to reading. Written
language only began at around 3200 BC, but spoken language has existed long ago.

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- reduce eye strain

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This video uses Google TTS en-US-Standard-D voice.



SUMMARY
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Approximately 330 to 360 million people speak English as their first language.
The United States has the most native speakers at 258 million and comprises the majority of the global total. As pictured in the pie graph below, most native speakers of English are Americans.
Additionally, there are 60 million native English speakers in the United Kingdom, 19 million in Canada, 16.5 million in Australia, 4.8 million in Ireland, and 4.8 million in New Zealand. Other countries also use English as their primary and official languages.
In the European Union, English is the one of 24 official languages and is widely used by institutions and majority of population as native (United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland) and as a second language in other member states.
English is the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish.Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly, from 470 million to more than 1 billion. David Crystal calculates that, as of 2003, non-native speakers outnumbered native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. When combining native and non-native speakers, English is the most widely spoken language worldwide.
Besides the major varieties of English, such as American English, British English, Canadian English, Australian English, Irish English, New Zealand English and their sub-varieties, countries such as South Africa, India, the Philippines, Jamaica and Nigeria also have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from English-based creole languages to Standard English.