English is spoken by approximately 380 million native speakers and over 1.5 billion total speakers worldwide, making it the most widely used international language. It originated in England and has spread globally through migration, trade, the former British Empire, and the influence of the United States. Today, English serves as an official or primary language in dozens of countries and is the dominant language of international business, science, aviation, diplomacy, entertainment, and the internet. Written using the Latin alphabet, English follows a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, has relatively little grammatical inflection, and relies heavily on word order and auxiliary verbs to express grammatical meaning.
Stats
Language Family: Indo-European
Writing System: Latin
Writing System Type: Alphabet
Writing Direction: L to R
Tones / Pitch Accent: N
Morphology: Analytic (with some fusional features)
Cases: 3 (primarily in pronouns: subjective, objective, possessive)
Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0
Number of Verb Tenses: 2 morphological (past, present)
Word Order: SVO
Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): ~20 (varies by dialect)
Number of Consonants: 24
Areas Where Spoken
United Kingdom (official) (95%+) (~64.5 mil)
United States (de facto national language) (78%) (~258 mil)
Canada (official) (75%) (~30 mil)
Australia (de facto national language) (72%) (~19 mil)
New Zealand (official) (95%) (~4.8 mil)
Ireland (official) (98%) (~4.9 mil)
South Africa (official) (9.6%) (~5.9 mil)
Nigeria (official) (~53%) (~120 mil L2 and L1 speakers)
India (associate official) (~10%) (~125 mil L2 and L1 speakers)
Singapore (official) (48%) (~2.8 mil)
Note: English is an official language in over 60 countries and territories, and in many regions (such as India and Nigeria), it is primarily spoken as a second language rather than a native language.
Resources
Test your English level: https://englishmeasure.com/en