ABSTRACT
English has gone global. Today, English dominates the world stage in a number of language uses: it is the main language of publishing, science, technology, commerce, diplomacy, air-traffic control and popular music. The reasons for this are to do with the political and economic power of Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth century. These same reasons also account for a dramatic increase in the number of users of English. In the sixteenth century there were approximately 3 million speakers of English. Today, there are over 300 million native speakers of English. To this, one could add a further 300 million who regularly speak English as a second language (i.e. in addition to their native language), and then there are the countless numbers of people who have learnt English as a foreign language (more Chinese people are learning English than there are native speakers of English in the USA!). In fact, it has been estimated that in total around a billion people use English with varying degrees of proficiency. Calculating numbers of users of English is fraught with difficulties, but there can be no doubt that English is the most widely used language in the world.
