English as the language of international communication

Being the third most common native language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, English is the leading language of international discourse and the global lingua franca through American-dominated media and technology. Owing to the assimilation of words from all over the world, modern English contains a very large vocabulary and the Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words, not including many technical, scientific and slang terms.

As the first language English is spoken by the majority populations of the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Alongside with these five main sovereigns there are many other countries, with a smaller population, that use English on a day-to-day basis as their first language.

English is widely learned as the second language and the countries with the highest numbers of second language English speakers are India, Nigeria and the Philippines.

English is an official language of almost 60 countries and many world organizations including the European Union and the United Nations.