History of this quiz. At first, it include ALL speakers either as a first or second language. This became unworkable due to different definitions of "English speaker" between countries.
So we de-featured the quiz due to lack of quality data.
Then people nominated it so we had to re-feature it. This time around, we included only native speakers because the data is much more accurate. It also has the nice coincidence of having exactly 10 countries and a sharp drop off below 1 million to number 11.
I'm always surprised w/r to quizzes like this that a certain former British colony on the subcontinent doesn't have more native English speakers, given the sheer number of people. But indeed there is only about a quarter million. Compare that with the number of former French or Spanish colonies in which those languages are either dominant or at least an official language.
The list only includes people who speak English as their first language. Tens of millions of Filipinos can speak English sufficiently, but the vast majority of them speak it as a second language. Most people still grow up speaking Filipino and/or various regional languages like Cebuano.
English is a first language for many people in India, a country of well over a billion people. If Wikipedia are not including India, then they need to do their research better
The 2011 cencus of India gives 260'000 speakers of English as a first language. Nearly all of its over 100 million speakers speak it as a second or third language.
I'm surprised there are that many people in Singapore that speak English as a first language. I would have thought Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil are more common as first languages, and English mostly as a second language
Singaporean here! English as a first language is becoming increasingly common, especially among the younger generations (I'd guess that more than half of Millennials/Gen Zs have English as their first language), which is probably because 1) all subjects in school are taught in English 2) bilingual parents tend to choose to raise their children with English as it's more useful, and the parents themselves are using English more often when interacting with other people.
(Technically, I'd say most Singaporeans speak Singlish and not English as their first language, but apparently this wasn't an option in the census cited in Wikipedia, probably because the Singapore government considers Singlish as a wrong version of English rather than a language in its own right. In any case, it wouldn't matter because Singlish is an English-based creole, which is also fine because of the caveat.)
I'm surprised India isn't on here. I know that they mostly speak Hindi but even if 0.5% of the population spoke English as a first language you would have around 5 million speakers. Why isn't India on here?
Despite the claim that this data is more accurate, I'm skeptical. There are more people in India and the Philippines who grow up speaking English than there are in Nigeria. And they're not speaking some janky creole or pidgin language, either. I guess it's still considered a 2nd language even if they start learning it basically at birth, if at the same time they speak Marathi or Cebuano at home more often. But the quiz says "native speaker".... and... there are also many multiple definitions out there of what constitutes a "native speaker" of English. As someone who taught English to speakers of other languages I can attest to this. The source QM links to doesn't say "native speaker"... it says "as first language"... that's different.
oh I'm sorry. You were legitimately trying to pull at our heart strings or inspire outrage? Okay, I amend my response: I'm sure that vivid picture of your fantasies of colonial oppression would elicit a round of enthusiastic finger snapping at the parties you imagine yourself going to.
Weirdness of this comment aside... I'm surprised too that the Philippines and India don't make this list, but a good amount of data is available for those countries and apparently they don't. But anyways, even if Nigerian Pidgin wasn't counted, Nigeria would still make this list. Many Nigerians speak (standard) English as a first language and some are even monolingual English speakers.
I was going to say that figure for South Africa seems a bit sus, but adding up 1/3 of South Africa's white population (with the other 2/3 speaking Afrikaans natively) and the entire Indian population (who overwhelmingly speak English at home), it comes surprisingly close.
I would like to petition for Creoles to not count for this list since they are different languages after all. Nigeria and Singapore would still make the list, but Jamaica would be taken off. Also, if Creoles are being counted here, then Trinidad and Tobago, Cameroon, and Ghana should be on here according to Wikipedia/Ethnologue. Also, according to the Wikipedia page sourced in this quiz, Egypt and Sudan should also be on here but I really doubt they have over 1 million native English speakers. Also, Kenya should be on here, look up "Primary languages spoken at home in Kenya 2021" and you can see 3.8% of Kenyans or roughly 2 million people speak English at home.
So we de-featured the quiz due to lack of quality data.
Then people nominated it so we had to re-feature it. This time around, we included only native speakers because the data is much more accurate. It also has the nice coincidence of having exactly 10 countries and a sharp drop off below 1 million to number 11.
I'm always surprised w/r to quizzes like this that a certain former British colony on the subcontinent doesn't have more native English speakers, given the sheer number of people. But indeed there is only about a quarter million. Compare that with the number of former French or Spanish colonies in which those languages are either dominant or at least an official language.
(Technically, I'd say most Singaporeans speak Singlish and not English as their first language, but apparently this wasn't an option in the census cited in Wikipedia, probably because the Singapore government considers Singlish as a wrong version of English rather than a language in its own right. In any case, it wouldn't matter because Singlish is an English-based creole, which is also fine because of the caveat.)