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Over 66M American Residents Don’t Speak English At Home
28 million don’t speak English-period.
Without doubt. English is the world’s most dominant language. It is also the language of a growing number of businesses and services around the globe and in less than 100 years has come to be the standard language out of the the planet’s current 7,100 known languages. This is the official number of spoken languages according to the Ethnologue guide, but this number is in decline and has been for some time. Ninety percent of the world’s languages are now spoken by approximately 100,000 people.
Whether we like it or not, English is the global language of business. An ever-growing number of multinational companies are using English as their corporate language. They include companies Samsung, Airbus, Microsoft in Beijing, Nokia, Renault, Daimler-Chrysler, SAP, and Technicolor to name a few. Almost 1.8 billion people, nearly 1 in 4 of Earth’s people now speak English on a day to day basis.
The airline industry universally uses “Aviation English”. It is the go-to, default language of the travel industry. When the expansion of air travel began in earnest in 1935, the dominant safety concern was about the ability of pilots and air traffic controllers to communicate clearly and precisely. This is where the flexibility of the English language…