Lesson Why is English a world language? 3 1. Vocabulary. Britain is the home of the English language, but English is also used in many other countries. 1) What information about the English language does the map give? 2) What other facts about the English language are there in the text? Use the Word Box to learn the meaning of the highlighted words. Have you ever thought how many people speak English? The exact number is difficult to tell, but it is more than one thousand million people, that is 20 per cent of the world's population. English is the most widespread language on earth; it is second only to Chinese in the number of people who speak it. The English lan- guage is now the native language* of more than 400 million people and the offi- cial language* in over 60 countries. If you add to this the enormous number of people who study English as a foreign language, you will understand that English is a major world language.