English is a very important language to know, no matter where you live. Though you already knew that because you are studying English! You may not know all the different places that English is spoken around the world though. Where is English spoken by the largest number of native speakers?  What country has the highest percentage of native English speakers?  You can find those answers and more below.

First of all let’s take a look at where English is spoken. You might want to look back at a previous post I wrote about the anglosphere that looks at where English is spoken around the world for more information on this.  Below is a map (from Wikipedia) that shows the percentage of English speakers (not just native English speakers) by country.  The dark green indicates 80-100% of people in that country speak English.  The lightest green indicates 0-20% of people in that country speak English.  There are varying shades of green in between dark and light that indicates 20-80% of people speak English in those countries.  Looking at this map you will see a large proportion of people all over the world are speaking English, even if it isn’t their native language (ESL speakers are included in these numbers).  An interesting piece of information to note is that there is no widely agreed upon definition of the ESL speaker.  A native speaker is easy to define: a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood. An ESL speaker on the other hand can be anyone from the most basic beginner to an advanced ESL speaker.  Also of interest when looking at this map is the fact that countries where there are a large number of English speakers, the English language may not necessarily be the official language of the country.  For example, English is not the official language of the United States of America. It is the de facto or accepted language, but it has never been made the official language of the United States even though 95% of people living in America say they speak English “well” or “very well.”

So, let’s get back to the questions I started with in the beginning of this post: Where is English spoken by the largest number of native speakers? The answer to that questions is not surprisingly the United States of America, where there is somewhere around 280,000,000 native speakers of English (among 319,000,000 inhabitants). India is the country that comes in second with the largest number of native English speakers, with somewhere around 100,000,000 native speakers. The countries with the largest percentage of native English speakers (in their whole population) are quite a bit smaller and usually are island nations.  Each of these countries has over 95% native English speakers: Ireland, Jamaica, Barbados, and Bermuda! You can compare this to the United States where somewhere around 80% of people speak English as their native language.