English is spoken in many countries in the world and is today the leading international language. Approximately one billion people speak English as their mother tongue, second or foreign language, and almost 70 percent of the Internet content is in English.
Nowhere, the generational differences are as clear as in Russia in terms of knowledge in English. Mature businessmen and government officials - who rarely speak English - have not always adapted to a non-Soviet approach to business. However, you don´t get any vodka during meetings anymore.
In Poland, the knowledge of English among the business leaders is also a problem. Most people there speak no English and do not even have their websites in English.
The world language English is soon spoken by one billion people and within ten years by two billion. But while the number of people who learn English in school is increasing sharply, the ones with English as a mother tongue will be reduced by 10 percent in 2020.
Out of those who today speak English as their first language, five out of six live in the U.S. or the UK, and most others in the British condominium. Yet there are more English speakers in both India and Nigeria than in Britain.
Among countries where English is not their first language Sweden is in the 18th place with 6.6 million people - despite the fact that almost three out of four in our country speaks customable English. It is less than the number of English-speaking Turks, Poles and Russians.
The English that we foreigners speak is sometimes called broken English, and sometimes “Globish”. It has its regional variations and it can be difficult, for example, for a Kenyan to understand a Japanese and vice versa although both speak their local form of the language very well.
Gun Helland