to what level – is the taxi driver at the airport who says 20 dollars to hotel an English speaker?
there is no reliable method of gathering the statistics there are statistics for a restricted list of countries in which ‘English has held, or continues to hold a special place’ and these are available in David Crystal’s ‘Encyclopedia of the English Language'(p109) nearly one in two European Union citizens claim to be able to converse in English* according to a survey carried out in 1998, and 69 per cent of survey respondents who did not speak English as their first language felt that it was the most important language for them to learn or use. Source: Eurobarometer 50 *This includes the 16 per cent of EU citizens who speak English as their first language.
