this is a lie...
No it's not.
By measure of native speakers, possibly. By measure of total speakers, no.
Edit: I was replying to scared celtic
The collocation used is "widely spoken", referring to geographic diversity rather than number of speakers. Most certainly, due to how many people know and use at least some English, there are more localities in the world where at least a little English is spoken, than any other language.
On the contrary, English has more total speakers than any other language. Mandarin is the language with the most native speakers.
Source: Ethnologue
https://www.ethnologue.com/guid...oken-languages
https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/ethnologue200
I'm going to go ahead and remove the "lie" tag from the sentence.
It’s not because you « know and use » some English that you speak it most. Far from the truth. In countries such as India or Pakistan, where English is accounted as « spoken », the reality is it is not. People actually speak Hindi, Urdu and the hundreds of other local languages that are there. Hearing English there is a rare event...
You know, it's interesting that you don't consider India as an English-speaking country, since when we were arguing about the space before exclamation mark sentence, you stated that this is "alternate punctuation" used in Mauritania and parts of INDIA.
https://tatoeba.org/spa/sentenc...omment-1252237
https://tatoeba.org/spa/sentenc...omment-1252252
Does that make their English not valid? Does this disqualify them as native speakers? Thus rendering your earlier argument invalid by restricting the criteria only to native speakers in Britain, the U.S., Australia and Canada, the "true" major English-speaking countries, none of which commonly employ your precious space?
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Make up your mind.
I appreciate sacredceltic's intimate knowledge of India and Pakistan. As a brown Indian, I cannot possibly be expected to be as informed on the reality of India as a white man living in Belgium.
Well then you perfectly know that in India you would 1st speak your native language - Marathi - then a 2d dominant Indian language : Hindi or Urdu, depending on the territory you would be located, and as a 3d option only, the 3d language you would have learnt: English.
Stop lying about the universality of English as the main spoken language in India. This is just contrary to facts. Even your Prime Minister, educated in a British college, doesn’t speak good understandable English.
*start making popcorn*
That my Prime Minister was educated in a British college comes as news to me, and I'm sure it would be news to him as well.
That much of your message was amusing enough to be interesting. The rest can go into the trash where it belongs.
I was referring to the former one : Manmohan Singh. As hard as I tried, I could never understand any of his discourses in English. He was the actual demonstration that English is not “widely spoken” in India. I don’t think the present one is any better...
At best, English is the language that accounts the most people that can properly speak 50 words of. But even of that, I have my doubts.
I think more people actually speak Mandarin or a proper Spanish. I understand all discourses in Spanish by politicians from the former Spanish empire. That’s what “spoken” is.
The correct speaking of English in the Indian subcontinent and many other African and asiatic countries where English is supposed to be official language is nowhere as wide as the correct speaking of Spanish in its former colonies.
I actually used Manmohan Singh investiture discourse’s video to prove to Europeans who declared they spoke English fluently that it wasn’t actually the case, since none of them was ever able to correctly make out what this Oxford & Cambridge educated guy said. Either he doesn’t speak English or they don’t. In any case, they don’t “speak” the same language that they both name “English”
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