Further to this post of yesterday I found some more information amongst the comments at Biased BBC:
'‘”Today there are about 6,000 languages in the world, and half of the world’s population speaks only 10 of them. English is the single most dominant of these 10. British colonialism initiated the spread of English across the globe; it has been spoken nearly everywhere and has become even more prevalent since World War II, with the global reach of American power.”As I thought...
(Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. Viking, 2007)’
‘How many people in the world today speak English?
First-language speakers: 375 million
Second-language speakers: 375 million
Foreign-language speakers: 750 million
(David Graddol, The Future of English? A Guide to Forecasting the Popularity of the English Language in the 21st Century. British Council, 1997)’
No comments:
Post a Comment