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Allying the number of speakers of the world's languages is an increasingly complex task, particularly with the push in many countries to teach English in their public schools. How many people can actually use the global language? David Graddol estimated a total of 750 million L1 (first or native language) plus L2 (English as a second or non-native language) speakers of English in his report “Future of English” for the British Council. Martin Schel has reviewed Prof. Braj Kachru's new book “Asian Englishes” which claims that India and China combined have over half a billion "users" of the English language.

Indeed, many people are bilingual or multilingual, but here we assign only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach). No adjustments have been made for infants or illiteracy in the Internet penetration rate calculations.

Here are some facts:

1. Today there are over 400 million non-English speaking Internet users and nearly half of all Internet users live in Asia and Europe (this figure has grown to 75% by the end of 2005, when there were around a billion people online).
2. Internet use is growing exponentially outside the U.S./Canada; Analysts estimate that 71% of Internet use and 56% of e-commerce revenue came from outside the U.S.
3. Recent figures show that 70% of the world's purchasing power and 92% of the world's population live in countries where English is not the native language.
4. Forrester Research predicts that in the next two years online commerce will reach $6.8 trillion, and 50% of all online sales are expected to occur outside the U.S. The analyst firm projects that while the United States and North America currently preside over the majority of online transactions, this will shift in the coming years as Asian and European nations become more active.

(Source: NUA)

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