English today — one language, many varieties
Who speaks it
| GROUP | ROUGH NUMBERS |
|---|---|
| First-language speakers | 380 million |
| Second-language speakers | over 1 billion |
| Countries where it is official | more than 60 |
The important consequence: most English conversations in the world happen between two non-native speakers. A Bangladeshi engineer talking to a Korean client, a Nigerian doctor talking to a Brazilian colleague. You are not learning to sound British or American. You are learning to be understood.
The main varieties
| VARIETY | NOTES |
|---|---|
| British | The standard across Europe, South Asia, and much of Africa |
| American | The standard across the Americas and much of East Asia |
| Indian / South Asian | Its own established standard, with 250+ million speakers |
| Australian, Canadian, Irish, and others | Regional standards with their own vocabulary |
Differences are mostly vocabulary and accent, and rarely cause misunderstanding.
| BRITISH | AMERICAN |
|---|---|
| flat | apartment |
| lift | elevator |
| lorry | truck |
| petrol | gas |
| queue | line |
| mobile | cell phone |
| colour, centre, organise | color, center, organize |
What actually makes you understood
Three things matter more than accent, and all three are trainable:
Word stress. English words have one strong syllable. PHOtograph, phoTOgrapher, photoGRAPHic are the same root with the stress in three places, and putting it in the wrong place is the single most common cause of a native speaker not understanding a learner.
Sentence rhythm. English compresses unimportant words and stretches important ones. I would like a cup of tea comes out closer to I’d like a CUP of TEA.
Consonant endings. Walk, walked, walks differ only at the end, and dropping the ending removes the tense.
Accent is not on that list. A strong accent with correct stress is understood; a light accent with wrong stress often is not.