After the United Kingdom, Germany has the most English speakers with This is followed by France Germany, for example, only has about , native English speakers. As in the Caribbean, a number of African countries have English as an official language because of colonialism. In all of Africa — a population of about 1. But following the pattern of a number of other continents, a number of Africans have learned English as a second language.
Around million people in Africa speak English in total including native and non-native speakers. The greatest number of English speakers are in Nigeria, where there are about million people who speak at least some of the language. Nigeria is followed by Uganda 29 million , South Africa 16 million and Cameroon 9. Asia has relatively few native English speakers, but a large number of people speak English as a second or foreign language. India — colonized by the United Kingdom until the midth century — has by far the most speakers, with around million speakers of English.
Across Oceania, there are over 30 million English speakers. The majority of Australians are native speakers, with about Most aspirational of all are the so-called "convent schools", founded by Christian missions.
My own family's maid in Bombay spends a third of her monthly salary to send her child to St Theresa's, run by Catholic priests. When I visited the school to see if she was getting her money's worth, I discovered that most pupils had little grasp of their medium of instruction. At morning assembly, they recited the school prayer parrot-fashion in a sing-song which was hard to identify as English. The principal, aptly named Father Goodwill, is fatalistic.
I could not help wondering if these children might be better off learning in their mother-tongues and studying English as a second language. At a Marathi-medium school where volunteers run classes in spoken English, the organiser told me they were getting better results than at many schools with the more aspirational English-medium label. This linguistic schizophrenia presents a huge commercial opportunity for hundreds of new language centres offering English to young, white-collar workers, who pay as much as half their monthly salary for evening classes.
With teachers whose own English is poor, places like these churn out people whose English may be barely comprehensible, as many of us discover when we speak to Indian call centres. What is emerging from this jungle of poor teaching is not so much English as Hinglish, or what my parents' generation called Babu English - the language of clerks.
In essence, it defines our identities. Therefore, what is perhaps most damning is that because of this favoritism afforded to the English language the cultures of India are dying as they lose out on generations of authors, activists, actors, artists, playwrights, innovators, orators, and businesspersons who would have otherwise contributed to, and enriched, their own language.
What is most fascinating in all this is that it is companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung which are reaching out and providing the tools to the people and the state governments to advance the local languages. It seems evident that in the case of India and elsewhere, multiple languages ought to be taught and be taught well to allow individuals not only to operate in a globalized world but to also bring together local communities that have been fractured and segregated by the economics of language.
It remains the obligation of the local governments to guarantee the enfranchisement of the people, remove the artificial socioeconomic barriers of language, and encourage social mobility. In the mean time, Indians have private sector ingenuity to thank for the advancement of their languages.
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