How many people speak English worldwide?

How to get close to this number

Separate the two populations before estimating either. Native speakers are bounded by the populations of a handful of countries, which totals a few hundred million. Second-language speakers are bounded by how many people worldwide have had schooling that includes it, which is a much larger number — and adding them gives the total.

The ratio in the explanation is the historically unprecedented part: non-natives outnumber natives roughly four to one. No language in history has had that shape. Latin, Arabic and French all spread widely, but none reached a point where the great majority of its speakers learned it deliberately as an additional language.

That ratio has a consequence people rarely consider: the language is increasingly shaped by people who did not grow up with it. The variety used in international business, science and aviation is not any national variety, and native speakers are frequently the hardest to understand in those settings because they use idiom the majority never learned.