Template:English language

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English  
Pronunciation: /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]
Spoken in: Listed in the article
Total speakers: First language: 309–400 million
Second language: 199–1,400 million[2][3]
Overall: 0.5–1.8 billion[3] 
Ranking: 3 (native speakers)[4][5]
Total: 1 or 2 [6]
Language family: Indo-European
 Germanic
  West Germanic
   Anglo–Frisian
    Anglic
     English 
Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
Official status
Official language in: 53 countries
Flag of the United Nations United Nations
Flag of Europe European Union
Commonwealth of Nations
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng 
Countries where English is a majority language are dark blue; countries where it is an official but not a majority language are light blue. English is also one of the official languages of the European Union.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
  1. ^ "English, a. and n." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 6 September 2007 http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50075365
  2. ^ see: Ethnologue (1984 estimate); The Triumph of English, The Economist, Dec. 20, 2001; Ethnologue (1999 estimate); 20,000 Teaching Jobs (English). Oxford Seminars. Retrieved on 2007-02-18.;
  3. ^ a b Lecture 7: World-Wide English. EHistLing. Retrieved on 2007-03-26.
  4. ^ Ethnologue, 1999
  5. ^ CIA World Factbook, Field Listing - Languages (World).
  6. ^ Languages of the World (Charts), Comrie (1998), Weber (1997), and the Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) 1999 Ethnologue Survey. Available at The World's Most Widely Spoken Languages