>Would you care to give sources for your numbers? I have a hard time
>beliving that only 500 million speak english. And also, how do you
>count who can function in the language or not? standard kindergarten?
>or 5th grade (US), or with graduate degrees in the english language?

Say 6th-grade US, but actually able to function in day-to-day society. There are English professors in Japan who have graduate degrees in the language and know far more about the language than 99.99% of its native speakers ever will, but who can't hold an actual conversation with a native speaker because they can't speak with a comprehensible accent or have any understanding of idiomatic slang. Many of the alleged English speakers I've met for whom it is a second language are at about this level. (They can often communicate via written English, but speaking? Forget it.) And there's also people I've met who learn English words but don't actually learn the language. ("Throw me down the stairs my pants.")

As for my numbers, I'm pulling them from memory from an encyclopaedia a couple of years old, and adjusting mentally for increases in population. There's about 280 million people in the US, probably 260 million of them who speak English as their native language; add in the native-English speaking populations of the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the former British colonies, and you hit 300 million, maybe 320 million. All told, at most there's maybe 700 million English speakers in the world. Again, compare to the various dialects of Chinese for sheer numbers (though not geographical spread), and you're still outmoded. (And, for that matter, French and Spanish each have almost the geographical spread English does. Just not an economic/cultural influence who use it as their native language.)

>No, not really. A Sicillian speaker and a Spanish speaker
>could get along pretty well, but italian and spanish have about as
>much in common as english and spanish. The only thing that they have
>in common is some minor grammer points, but other then that they are
>pretty much completely different.

In this case I'm talking from the experience of a number of people I know who speak fluent Italian and are able to communicate quite well with Castillian Spanish speakers. (Mexican might be a different matter; I don't know.) Interestingly, Portuguese speakers can usually understand Castillian Spanish, but the reverse is rarely true (although if you read Portuguese you can usually read Spanish; I can get the gist of written Spanish, although I can't always get the fine details). And Dutch speakers typically have a far easier time understanding English than the reverse (even if they've never learned English), while Frisian and UK English are mutually intelligible.

>8,008,278. And yes, I would, for purposes of a world langauge poll.
>"New York City speaks New York-ese" Or "New York cityites complain
>about life in general" Now, I wouldn't sneer at New York City its
>self, because of the history of the city, and the fact that it's
>almost impossible to get good challa, or pizza anywhere else. (I
>still think it's the water.)

My point. 14 million people is a lot of people; the fact that the number of Esperantists is on the rise (even in comparison to the rise in world population)is also impressive. Personally, I plan on teaching the language to my children. (Hebrew was resurrected by people who spoke only the language -- and it had been a dead language -- to their children. But I don't plan on doing that; English is a far more important and more difficult language to learn.) (And New York-ese isn't spoken by 8 million people; a good chunk of New Yorkers, even native-born, don't speak English as a native language.)

As for New York pizza and challah... yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the water. I've found a place in G'boro that's *almost* New York pizza. I think it's as close to New York pizza as it's possible to get without that interesting New York water.

-- Sean --
"I didn't know you could chew water."
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