Remix clone Hacker News

As I've said, you can't just sum up populations. About 20% of the US population are immigrants. A lot of them won't speak English as their native language.

Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language.

I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.

▲

permo-w 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd like to see their working for that number. Let's say we subtract 20% from Canada + the UK + the US, we get ~320 million. add Nigeria and Uganda and you have easily 400 million. That's without Australia, Ireland, New Zealand or any of the African or Caribbean countries.

	▲	Retric 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You have easily 400 million No you don’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Nigeria ~60 million people in Nigeria speak English out of 230 million people, but that 60 million isn’t almost exclusively native speakers.
	▲	InsideOutSanta 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There aren't that many native English speakers in Nigeria and Uganda. To me, it looks like your back-of-the-envelope calculation will come pretty close to 400 million.