jwb@csse.monash.edu.au wrote:

> USA                298M
> UK          60M
> Canada              22M (out of 33M)
> Australia   20M
> South Africa         5M (out of 44M)
> Ireland              4M
> New Zealand          4M
> 
> we're up to 413M. You can probably scale that back a bit, but you won't
> get down to 330M.

But what makes English so overwhelmingly important in the world today is
the fact that there are many more non-native speakers of English than
native speakers. From a recent Newsweek article:

> "non-native English-speakers" worldwide now outnumber native ones 3 to 1.
> In Asia alone, Newsweek says, the number of English users has topped 350
> million - roughly the combined populations of the United States, the UK
> and Canada. There are more Chinese children studying English - about 100
> million - than there are Britons (that's nearly twice as many). 

(http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20050307TheGlobalizationofEnglish.html)

English is also the official language of India, and about 10% of Indians
are reckoned to be English speakers.

In the end, the joke will be on the OP; with so many non-native
speakers, soon their English will become more widespread than the native
speaker varieties. Indian English, for example is,
linguistically-speaking, as valid a variety of the English language as
British English, and has at least as many variants. Just as British
English could be anything from BBC English to Geordie, so Indian English
could be Hinglish (Hindi English) or Tanglish (Tamil English), etc.

Elsewhere around the globe, from Spanglish to Japlish, from Scotland to
Jamaica, a myriad varieties of English are creeping on apace. By the
time the OP is old enough to grow a beard his particular variety of
English will likely have been relegated from being a "god" to being a
rather quaint survival, spoken by only a small minority of the world's
English speakers.

John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com