Today is English Language Day in 2024: Celebrate the Most Spoken Language in the World

Professor Henry Higgins, the phonetician at the center of George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated work “Pygmalion” – one of the most erudite comedies in the English language – and the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” asks the question, “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?,” but as it happens, hundreds of millions of people seem to be successfully doing just that,  “speaking English any way they like,” as Higgins said to Colonel Pickering outside the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.

Some 25% of the world’s population speaks English to some extent, with almost 400 million speaking it as their mother tongue. It is the vernacular in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, and it has a major presence in Ireland, South Africa, and several Caribbean nations.  Beyond this, there are 1.077 billion second-language speakers of English according to the 26th edition of Ethnologue, published in 2023.

Indeed, the English-speaking world comprises 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, and/or cultural language and it is a lingua franca for business and education.

All this places it as the most spoken language in the world, with an estimated 1.456 billion speakers, , thus making it a candidate for the world’s language, ostensibly an Esperanto for the 21st century.

Given this, it should come as no surprise that Shaw’s “Pygmalion” actually had its world premiere at Vienna’s Burgtheater.

While each country where English is spoken has its unique accent and vocabulary, they all share a common linguistic bond.

Such a spread around the globe has undoubtedly influenced the development of the language, leading to the creation of various dialects and accents and some pundits have predicted that, by 2050, half the world will be more or less proficient in it.

English is the language of globalization, politics, and diplomacy (sorry, French). Even where it’s not fully understood, it’s used on posters, in advertising, and in sports for its supposed cachet.

English is the global language of academic research, regardless of where it takes place, and is used worldwide in some fields, such as air-traffic control, regardless of where an aircraft is taking off or landing. It is interesting to note that the European Union is dominated by the language of a member that left the bloc several years ago.

Further, an ever-increasing number of firms across the globe are adopting English as their official language. Put together a meeting with delegates from Berlin, Bratislava, Bucharest, and Budapest and English will be what unites them.

Curiously, or perhaps not, native English speakers are being quickly outnumbered by those who speak it as a second language and who, in many respects, are taking control of its future. It’s so widely spoken and so many versions have evolved that native speakers from one region may have trouble understanding native speakers from another or even those speaking fluent “English” as a second language. One example is Euro-English grammar: many nouns that in English don’t take a final “s” in their plural form are pluralized nonetheless with the fricative in cases such as “informations” and “competences.”

The smashing success of English is not because it is easy: indeed, its grammar appears deceptively easy thanks to only having two genders and an overreliance on the word “it” as a pronoun, but verb conjugations lean to the irregular and spelling and pronunciation are frequently at odds with one another.

English has, however, adapted with the times and that has given it staying power while other languages in their day failed to keep up.

As the poet Edward Waller wrote in the 17th century,

Poets, that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
We write in sand, our language grows,
And, like the tide, our work o’erflows.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)