English

About the English guides

English is spoken by about 380 million people as a first language and by about 750 million more as a second language. It is an official language in more than 50 countries and the most widely used language for international business, science and travel.

The guides in this category are about English itself. Many explain how to pronounce a word or name, such as a place, a brand, a medicine or a scientific term, and many others show different ways to say something in English, from formal to casual. English spelling is a poor guide to sound, so the same letters can be read in several ways, as in though, through and tough. Stress matters too: putting it on the wrong syllable can make a familiar word hard to recognize.

FamilyIndo-European, Germanic (West Germanic)
Native speakersabout 380 million (2019)
Second-language speakersabout 750 million (2019)
Official inmore than 50 countries
ScriptLatin alphabet, 26 letters
Codesen (ISO 639-1), eng (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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