English language

English is currently one of the most widely spoken and written languages worldwide, with some 380 million native speakers and over 500 millions non-native speakers. English is spoken by one out of every six people in the world. It is the primary language of 53 countries: the United States, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and, partly, Canada and others. Of all the world's languages English is arguably the richest in vocabulary; and that the Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words, not including technical and scientific terms.

The English language was first introduced to the Americas by British colonization, beginning in the early 17th century. Similarly, the language spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and colonization elsewhere and the spread of the former British Empire.
Over the past 400 years, the form of the language used in the Americas, especially in the United States, and that used in the United Kingdom have diverged, leading to the dialects now occasionally referred to as American English and British English. Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, idioms, formatting of dates and numbers, and so on, although the differences in written and most spoken grammar structure tend to be much more minor than those of other aspects of the language in terms of mutual intelligibility.

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