>14 million against the Earth's total population is close enough to "no
>one" for government work...

Only 300 million or so speak English as their first language. If you add the people who speak it well as a second language, then you've got 500 to 600 million English speakers. (I'm discounting people who think they speak English but can't actually function in the language.) Compare that to 750 million native Cantonese speakers, or something like 1.2 billion if you count all the various dialects of Chinese. (Which isn't really viable from a linguistic point of view, since they're not mutually intelligible. An Italian speaker and a Spanish speaker could understand each other more readily than someone who spoke only Mandarin and someone who only spoke Cantonese.)

And 14 million people is larger than the population of a number of European countries and Southeast Asian; many of those countries are not the kind that one dismisses as "no one." New York City has a population of about 8 million; I don't think you could say no one lives there.

14 million people is nothing to sneeze at.

-- Sean --

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