Meanwhile, Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma’s novel The Fishermen won several awards and is being translated into 15 languages. And there’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a novelist, feminist writer, and short story author. But there’s also Chris Abani, who was imprisoned twice as a teenager after publishing books the government at the time considered suspect. You may have heard of Chinua Achebe, the Man Booker-prize winning author of Things Fall Apart who died in 2013, or Nigerian poet and Nobel Prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka. Nigeria is also home to world-renowned authors who write in English. A growing economy with a vibrant literary and entertainment scene

Nigeria: 79M-100MĮnglish is the official language of Nigeria, with somewhere between 79M and 100M speakers. However, a little over 92% of the population can speak it as a second language. Only around 37,000 Filipinos speak it as a first language. The Philippines has two official languages: Filipino and English. Although virtually nobody in Pakistan speaks English as a first language, around 49% of the population do speak it as a second language. Surprised? English is one of Pakistan’s official languages, along with Urdu. However, as BBC reporter Zareer Masani noted in a 2012 article, the patchwork state of English education means that many Indians speak “not so much English as Hinglish, or what my parents’ generation called Babu English – the language of clerks.” Pakistan: 94M But only 226, 449 of those speak it as a first language. India is next on the list, with 125 million English speakers. Approximately 225 million Americans speak English as a first language, while 43 million speak it as a second language. No surprise here: Those arrogant former colonists may not speak the Queen’s English correctly, but they do have the world’ s largest English-speaking country. (335 million people speak it as a first language, and 505 million speak it as a second language.) That’s a lot of people, but where do they all live? Read on to find out which countries have the most English speakers and the highest English proficiency. Around 840 million people speak English around the world, according to Ethnologue.

Monolingual english speakers