Science Research Writing For Non-native Speakers Of English
English Language Statistics – an Exhaustive List
(Note: If you want to reference this article, in part of full, here are few details:
Name of the author: Anil Yadav
Month/ year of publication of this article: Dec 2018)
1. How widely is English language used?
1.1 How many people speak English?
At 1,121 million speakers (native + non-native), English is the most widely-spoken language in the world. Here is a comparison of number of speakers of most-spoken languages: 
Source: Ethnologue, 21st edition
1.2 Number of native and non-native English speakers
There are 378 million native speakers (those who speak English as their first language) and 743 million non-native speakers (those who speak English as their second language) in the world.
Source: Ethnologue, 21st edition
1.3 What % of English conversations involve only native speakers?
If we listen to every conversation happening in the world, only 4 percent of the conversations involve only native speakers. Rest involve at least one non-native speaker.
1.4 English is the language on internet
English is the dominant language on internet. Nearly 54 percent of content on the internet is in English. Russian, at 6 percent, is a distant second. (The data pertains to 10 million websites with most traffic.) Here is the top-10 list:
Source: Historical trends in the usage of content languages for websites, W3Techs
1.5 English is the language of technical and scientific periodicals
More than 50 percent of the world's technical and scientific periodicals are in English.
Source: Discourses of the Developing World: Researching properties, problems and potentials
1.6 In how many countries is English spoken?
English is spoken in 118 countries. Here is a comparison with few other prominent languages in the decreasing order of number of countries where they're spoken.
(Note that in the chart below, number of countries is not the number where a language has official status. The number is that of countries where a language is one of the established languages.)
Source: Ethnologue, 21st edition
1.7 In how many countries is English recognized as an official language?
English is recognized as an official language in 59 countries. Here is a comparison with few other prominent languages in the decreasing order of number of countries where they're official languages.
Source: Wikipedia
1.8 English can have outsized impact in some countries
In countries where English is not the first language for most people but where work is regularly transacted in English, English can have an outsized influence.
In India, which fits the bill for such country, English (# 44) is light years behind Hindi (#1) as the first language of people. However, it is second only to Hindi when it comes to second language speakers, and it leads among third language speakers. Overall (combining the first, second, and third language speakers), it is the second most spoken language in the country.
Source: livemint
2. Vocabulary
2.1 Number of words in English Language and vocabulary of native & non-native speakers
Putting a number to words in English language is not easy because, first of all, it's not even clear what constitutes a word.
Should 'air' be counted twice – once as noun (example: the air is polluted) and once as verb (example: he finally decided to air his opinion)? Should medical and scientific terms be treated as words? Should names of countries be treated as words? Should obsolete words be included? And so on.
There are many questions on what constitutes a word, most with differing answers. And therefore, depending on the source you're referring to, you'll find multiple word counts in English language.
As per Oxford Dictionary, there are:
- 171,476 words in current use
- 250,000 distinct words, excluding inflections and words from technical and regional vocabulary
- 750,000 words if words are counted in the most liberal way
Source: Oxford Dictionary
Native speakers who grew up in an English-speaking country and went to college typically have a vocabulary size of 25-30,000 words.
(The above range is a rough, commonly-accepted estimate. In reality, estimates vary widely. This source, for example, estimates that a 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas (or dictionary words), and this knowledge can be as superficial as knowing that the word exists. This estimate, however, puts the vocabulary size of a college student to 16,785 words.)
Note that even native speakers have a command over just 4 percent of words in English language. (We'll see later in the post that this small fraction covers almost all words used in spoken and written English.)
In contrast, non-native speakers typically have a vocabulary of 2-3,000 words. Source
2.2 Proportion of nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. among English words
Source: Oxford Dictionary
2.3 Not all words are created equal
Native speakers cover almost all words used in common parlance in spoken and written English. However, you don't need to attain their level of vocabulary to reach a high coverage of words in common English.
Dr. Brent Culligan, Joseph Phillips, and Dr. Charles Browne analyzed a corpus of 273 million words of spoken and written British and American English to come up with their New General Service List (NGSL) of 2,800 words. These words cover a whopping 92 percent of words people are likely to come across in average newspaper, magazine, TV show, book, movie, and so on. 92 percent coverage with only 2,800 words (around 10 percent of a native speaker's vocabulary)! Recall Pareto (or 80-20) principle.
3. Words, letters, and sounds – a comparison with other languages
3.1 Number of words
English has the most words (250,000 as per Oxford Dictionary) of all languages.
At another extreme is Toki Pona with just 123 words, the fewest of all languages. Source
3.2 Number of letters
Khmer, the official language of Cambodia and spoken by around 16 million people, has the most letters (74) in its alphabet. On the other extreme is Rotokas, spoken by around 4,300 people in Eastern part of Papua New Guinea, which has the fewest letters (12). Source 1 and Source 2
English, as you know, has 26 letters.
3.3 Number of sounds (or phonemes)
!Xóõ, spoken by around 4,200 people mainly in Botswana, has the most sounds (141). On the other extreme is Rotokas, which has the fewest sounds (11) of all languages.
English has 44 sounds. Source
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Science Research Writing For Non-native Speakers Of English
Source: https://lemongrad.com/english-language-statistics/
Posted by: burkethentom.blogspot.com
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