Speaking English

Which country boasts the most English speakers, or people learning to speak English?

The answer is China.

According to a study published by Cambridge University Press, up to 350 million people there have at least some knowledge of English – and at least another 100 million in India.

There are probably more people in China who speak English as a second language than there are Americans who speak it as their first. (A fifth of Americans speak a language other than English in their own homes.)

 1.5 billion people around the world speak English – but fewer than 400 million have it as their first language.

Thanks to advances in computer translation and voice-recognition technology, they can each speak their own language, and hear what their interlocutor is saying, machine-translated in real time. So English's days as the world's top global language may be numbered. To put it at its most dramatic: the computers are coming, and they are winning.

Why bother to learn English if computers can now do all the hard work for you? At Stanford University, in California, Wonkyum Lee, a South Korean computer scientist, is helping to develop translation and voice-recognition technology that will be so good that when you call a customer service helpline, you won't know whether you're talking to a human or a computer.

Christopher Manning, professor of machine learning, linguistics and computer science at the same institution, insists there is no reason why, in the very near future, computer translation technology can't be as good as, or better than, human translators.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-44200901