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Approximately 330 to 360 million people speak English as their first language. [1] The United States has the most native speakers at 258 million. Additionally, there are 62 million native English speakers in the United Kingdom , 32 million in Canada , 20 million in Australia , and 4.5 million in New Zealand. Other countries also use English as their primary and official languages.
Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly, from 470 million to more than 1 billion. David Crystal calculates that non-native speakers as of 2003 outnumbered native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. [3] When combining native and non-native speakers, English is the second most widely spoken language worldwide.
Besides the major varieties of English , such as American English , British English , Indian English , Canadian English , Australian English , Irish English , New Zealand English and their sub-varieties, countries such as South Africa , the Philippines , Jamaica and Nigeria also have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from English-based creole languages to Standard English.