Britannica Sources used in this answer

How many native speakers of English are there?

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Thematic map of Europe displaying the distribution of Germanic languages, with different colors indicating regions where English, German, Netherlandic (Dutch), Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are spoken. Striped areas mark regions where bilingualism is common, and language regions cover countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and parts of surrounding countries. — Germanic languages Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

Estimates for the number of native speakers of English vary depending on the source and the time of the data collection.

According to data from the Ethnologue language catalog from the early 2020s, there are approximately 379,682,200 native speakers of English. Other scholarly sources, such as those discussing the Germanic languages, have cited figures around 450 million native speakers.12

While English has fewer than 400 million native speakers, it is a widely used lingua franca with more than 1 billion non-native speakers, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.3