Re: Desirable USA name-change

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:13:55 -0700, Hatunen
<hatunen@xxxxxxx> said:

On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:13:29 -0700, Bob Cunningham
<exw6sxq@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:47:19 -0700, Hatunen
<hatunen@xxxxxxx> said:

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:37:15 +0800, Robert Bannister
<robban@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:

"nick" <pizzalovingcriminal@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:


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


I believe that to be entirely false. 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.


Your evidence being...?

The last time I looked, it was about two-thirds US. There are a lot
of people elsewhere who learn it as a second language, and they may
even use it as a lingua franca, but for native speakers, it's almost
certainly more than half US.

From the Wikipedia (the numbers seem reasonable and are mostly taken
from official or reputable sources):

US 215 million
UK 58 million
Canada 20 million
Australia 15 million
Ireland 4 million
South Africa 4 million
Philippines 3 million
New Zealand 3 million
Nigeria 1 million
Singapore 1 million


Strange those figures include the Philippines and Nigeria, but not India.

How many native speakers of English are there in India?

221,000, according to the 2007 _Britannica Book of the
Year_.

Barely a blip on the radar screen for the above list.

Yes, and it's an old, old topic of discussion in
alt.usage.english. In March 1995, in a posting that's at
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ywfoks *, I said in part

A key point in the earlier discussions had to do
with my assertion that the overwhelming majority
of native (mother-tongue) English speakers live
in The United States of America. The Britannica
figures yield the result that 69% of native
English speakers live in the United States,
which clearly confirms my assertion.

Another point that arises each time this subject
is discussed is typified by the remark, "How can
that be? Look at the hundreds of millions of
English speakers in the Indian subcontinent!"
The Encyclopedia Britannica table shows a total
of 310,000 native speakers of English in India,
This is less than one-tenth of one percent of
the total number of native-English speakers in
the world.

(Note the drop from 310,000 in 1995 to 201,000 in 2007. It
would be interesting to know how many mother-tongue speakers
of English there were in India in, say, 1938.)

A related question that I find interesting is how many
speakers of fluent Indian English learned it as a first
language. Another way to ask the question is how many of
the 221,000 native speakers of English speak the Indian
version of English.

Indian English in my experience has pronunciations like
"KAHn#t"* for "connect" and "AHv#l#b#l" for "available". I
wonder if native English speakers in India pronounce those
words that way.

* "#" is the schwa, the sound of the "o" in my pronunciation
of "bacon". "AH" is the (low, back, unrounded) sound of the
"a" in my pronunciation of "father".
.

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