Re: Desirable USA name-change



On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:17:53 -0000, "nick"
<pizzalovingcriminal@xxxxxxxxxx> said:


"Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

[...] Last I heard, more
native speakers of English lived in the United States than
in all other countries combined

I hate to burst your bubble, but that is not true.

It's not unusual for poorly informed people to say that that
is not true. For example, a typical nay-sayer in the past
has pointed to the billion or so people in India as a
counterexample. In fact, only a small proportion of the
people in India are native speakers of English, far fewer
than the number in America.

Note carefully what it is that you are saying is not true,
paying particular attention to the phrases "last I heard"
and "native speakers". I said

Last I heard, more native speakers of English lived
in the United States than in all other countries
combined

You have falsely asserted that that statement is not true.

The most recent figures I've examined in detail were taken
from the 1995 _Britannica Book of the Year_. From the table
in that book covering all countries and all languages, I
assembled a tabulation for English speakers only. You can
see that table at http://preview.tinyurl.com/dku6d *.

While the table shows for India 30,000,000 speakers of
English as a lingua franca, it shows only 310,000 speakers
of English as a mother tongue. A speaker of a language as a
lingua franca is assumed to not be a native speaker.

(The 2007 _Britannica Book of the Year shows India with
221,000 speakers of English as a mother tongue and
202,831,000 as a lingua franca. They remark in their
introduction that the probable precision of one of their
numbers can be inferred from the number of significant
figures used. From that it follows that the lingua franca
number for 1995 was a gross estimate, while the 2007 number
represents a more careful count. But those numbers have no
bearing on your bubble-busting but erroneous negation of my
assertion about native speakers.)

In a footnote to the table, I say

According to this information, the number of
mother-tongue English speakers in the world (not
counting those in Trinidad and Tobago) is
326,652,000. 69% of these live in the United
States.

(Trinidad English is so different from English per se that
it's not considered to be truly English. As shown in my
table, there were 1,190,000 speakers of Trinidad English in
the 1995 data. The 2007 data has 1,195,000.)

While my 69 percent value is based on the 1995 data, I
strongly doubt that the data have changed enough since then
to alter the conclusion that there are more native speakers
of English living in the United States of America than in
all other countries combined.

Here is a comparison of the 1995 and 2007 data for the top
seven countries in the table (fixed-pitch font recommended):

2007 1995
239,407,000 224,900,000 United States
57,559,000 56,830,000 United Kingdom
18,703,000 17,700,000 Canada
16,141,000 15,188,000 Australia
3,675,000 3,620,000 South Africa
3,751,000 3,340,000 Ireland
3.483,000 3,205,000 New Zealand

342,719,000 324,783,000 Totals

(Compare my 1995 total of 326,652,000 for all native-English
speakers in the world with 324,783,000 for the top seven in
the table. They're about the same.)

By the way, in case anyone has a problem with equating
"mother-tongue speaker" with "native speaker", let me quote
the following definitions from _NSOED_**:

mother tongue - (a) one?s native language;
native speaker - a person having the language in
question as a native language

Again by the way, if anyone wants to question the validity
of any of the numbers I've quoted, you can ask me if I've
copied the number from the book correctly, but beyond that
please take it up with the Britannica people, not me.

* ObRJV
http://www.alt-usage-english.org/Distribution_English_speakers.shtml

** _NSOED_ = _The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_
.

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