It turns out most of the world's people speak one of just 12 languages, with Chinese having the most speakers. On the other hand, English is spoken in the most countries (n=101) as a heritage of the global British Empire we wrote of last week. Being born a native English speaker has been a blessing.
Whereas English lags behind in the number of native speakers, it is by far the world's most commonly studied language. Overall, more people learn English than French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German and Chinese combined.English has 1.5 billion learners. As we travel the world, the DrsC privately joke to one another that soon the whole world will communicate, albeit awkwardly, in heavily accented English. And that may turn out to be no bad thing, overcoming the apocryphal curse of the Tower of Babel.
