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>“Non-native English speakers constitute almost 95% of the world’s population,” Amano says. “If we don’t support those 95%, I’m sure we can’t solve many global

>“Non-native English speakers constitute almost 95% of the world’s population,” Amano says. “If we don’t support those 95%, I’m sure we can’t solve many global challenges.” Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? I've been to Iceland and Denmark and everyone I spoke to in those places could speak English with near native fluency. I remember meeting one guy in a tiny village in northern Iceland. He sounded like a completely native American English speaker. It turned out that he had never even left his village to travel to Reykjavik, but still had me fooled into thinking that surely he had spent significant amount of time in America.

bitcuration 3y ago
Norse people are pretty amazing when it comes to English speaking, next comes German and Dutch. It seems EU people are generally potent in multilingual. Granted English may be like a dialect to them.
unmole 3y ago
Iceland and Denmark combined have a population of ~6 million. My hometown has almost twice as many people.
lifthrasiir 3y ago
> Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? You are right to wonder about that, but even when we assume every ESL speaker to be fluent enough the proportion only drops to 80%.
- brettp 3y ago
  I wonder where that statistic came from too. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... the number of L2 speakers of English is ~1b or 12.5% of the world population (~8b). But one thing that's missed is the advantage ESL speakers have: they by definition speak at least one other language. English speakers either don't have to or find it too hard to find someone to practise on even if they want to learn. The fact that English is the lingua franca of science has another advantage even to ESL speakers: they only have to learn English to communicate with just about any other scientist in the world. Imagine having to pick between learning English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, depending on who you wanted your audience to be?

bitcuration 3y ago

Norse people are pretty amazing when it comes to English speaking, next comes German and Dutch. It seems EU people are generally potent in multilingual. Granted English may be like a dialect to them.

unmole 3y ago

Iceland and Denmark combined have a population of ~6 million. My hometown has almost twice as many people.

lifthrasiir 3y ago

> Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? You are right to wonder about that, but even when we assume every ESL speaker to be fluent enough the proportion only drops to 80%.

brettp 3y ago
I wonder where that statistic came from too. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... the number of L2 speakers of English is ~1b or 12.5% of the world population (~8b). But one thing that's missed is the advantage ESL speakers have: they by definition speak at least one other language. English speakers either don't have to or find it too hard to find someone to practise on even if they want to learn. The fact that English is the lingua franca of science has another advantage even to ESL speakers: they only have to learn English to communicate with just about any other scientist in the world. Imagine having to pick between learning English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, depending on who you wanted your audience to be?