Mexico is the country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world. As of 2024, 132.5 million people in Mexico spoke Spanish with a native command of the language. Colombia was the nation with the second-highest number of native Spanish speakers, at around 52.7 million. Spain came in third, with 48 million, and Argentina fourth, with 46 million. Spanish, a world language As of 2023, Spanish ranked as the fourth most spoken language in the world, only behind English, Chinese, and Hindi, with over half a billion speakers. Spanish is the official language of over 20 countries, the majority on the American continent, nonetheless, it's also one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea in Africa. Other countries have a strong influence, like the United States, Morocco, or Brazil, countries included in the list of non-Hispanic countries with the highest number of Spanish speakers. The second most spoken language in the U.S. In the most recent data, Spanish ranked as the language, other than English, with the highest number of speakers, with 12 times more speakers as the second place. Which comes to no surprise following the long history of migrations from Latin American countries to the Northern country. Moreover, only during the fiscal year 2022. 5 out of the top 10 countries of origin of naturalized people in the U.S. came from Spanish-speaking countries.

Using data from reports such as the "English Proficiency Index" (EDU) from Education First, one can see the significant impact of culture, education and globalization on the ability of citizens of different countries to speak English.

This statistic presents the leading European countries by their level of English proficiency as of March 2019. According to data provided by Klazz, Sweden had the highest percentage of people who were proficient in English at ** percent of the population.

Singapore scored 609 out of a maximum of 800 points in the English Proficiency Index 2024, the highest score across the selected Asian countries and territories. In contrast, Cambodia reached an English Proficiency Index score of 408 that year.

Argentina scored 562 out of a maximum of 800 points in the English Proficiency Index 2023. That was the highest score among all Latin American countries included in the survey. The Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, also received the highest English proficiency score among all the Latin American cities analyzed. Mexico and Haiti received the lowest scores in the region.

Residents of Australia who were born overseas in one of the predominantly non-English speaking countries which are in the top ten for Australia in terms of high numbers of migrants, 2011 (highest to lowest: China, India, Italy, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany, Greece, Sri Lanka and Lebanon) (all entries that were classified as not shown, not published or not applicable were assigned a null value; no data was provided for Maralinga Tjarutja LGA, in South Australia). The data is by LGA 2015 profile (based on the LGA 2011 geographic boundaries). Source: Compiled by PHIDU based on ABS Census 2011 data.

"Facts and Figures, Profiles of Official Language Immigrants: English Speaking Permanent Residents in Quebec presents the annual intake of English-speaking permanent residents in the province of Quebec by category of immigration from 2006 to 2015. The report examines selected characteristics for English-speaking permanent residents. “English-speaking immigrants” are defined by the following criteria: 1) permanent residents with English as Mother Tongue; 2) permanent residents with Mother Tongue other than English and with “English Only” as official language spoken (excluding “Both English and French” as official language spoken). Note that official language(s) spoken (English only, French only, both French and English, and neither language) are self-declared indicators of knowledge of an official language. Please note that in these datasets, the figures have been suppressed or rounded to prevent the identification of individuals when the datasets are compiled and compared with other publicly available statistics. Values between 0 and 5 are shown as “--“ and all other values are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5. This may result to the sum of the figures not equating to the totals indicated. "

The United States is the non-hispanic country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world, with approximately 41.89 million people with a native command of the language in 2024. However, the European Union had the largest group of non-native speakers with limited proficiency of Spanish, at around 28 million people. Furthermore, Mexico is the country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world as of 2024.

People born in the ten most common non-English speaking background countries by SD, for the year 2011.

Context:

Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers.

This dataset allows you to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech.

All of the linguistic analyses of the accents are available for public scrutiny. We welcome comments on the accuracy of our transcriptions and analyses.

Content:

This dataset contains 2140 speech samples, each from a different talker reading the same reading passage. Talkers come from 177 countries and have 214 different native languages. Each talker is speaking in English.

This dataset contains the following files:

• reading-passage.txt: the text all speakers read
• speakers_all.csv: demographic information on every speaker
• recording: a zipped folder containing .mp3 files with speech

Acknowledgements:

This dataset was collected by many individuals (full list here) under the supervision of Steven H. Weinberger. The most up-to-date version of the archive is hosted by George Mason University. If you use this dataset in your work, please include the following citation:

Weinberger, S. (2013). Speech accent archive. George Mason University.

This datasets is distributed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Inspiration:

The following types of people may find this dataset interesting:

• ESL teachers who instruct non-native speakers of English
• Actors who need to learn an accent
• Engineers who train speech recognition machines
• Linguists who do research on foreign accent
• Phoneticians who teach phonetic transcription
• Speech pathologists
• Anyone who finds foreign accent to be interesting

Proportion of Twitter posts in most select languages by article author country.

People born in the ten most common non-English speaking background countries by LGA 2011, for the 2011.

Proportion of Facebook posts in select languages by article author country.

In 2025, there were around 1.53 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.18 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers at the time of survey. Hindi and Spanish accounted for the third and fourth most widespread languages that year. Languages in the United States The United States does not have an official language, but the country uses English, specifically American English, for legislation, regulation, and other official pronouncements. The United States is a land of immigration, and the languages spoken in the United States vary as a result of the multicultural population. The second most common language spoken in the United States is Spanish or Spanish Creole, which over than 43 million people spoke at home in 2023. There were also 3.5 million Chinese speakers (including both Mandarin and Cantonese),1.8 million Tagalog speakers, and 1.57 million Vietnamese speakers counted in the United States that year. Different languages at home The percentage of people in the United States speaking a language other than English at home varies from state to state. The state with the highest percentage of population speaking a language other than English is California. About 45 percent of its population was speaking a language other than English at home in 2023.

Probability posting in English, by author country English primacy.

Probability to post in English or Portuguese on Twitter over Facebook, by Author’s Country.

English(the United kingdom) Spontaneous Dialogue Smartphone speech dataset

Description

English(the united kingdom) Spontaneous Dialogue Smartphone speech dataset, collected from dialogues based on given topics. Transcribed with text content, timestamp, speaker's ID, gender and other attributes. Our dataset was collected from extensive and diversify speakers(around 500 native speakers), geographicly speaking, enhancing model performance in real and complex tasks. Quality tested by various AI companies. We strictly adhere to data protection regulations and privacy standards, ensuring the maintenance of user privacy and legal rights throughout the data collection, storage, and usage processes, our datasets are all GDPR, CCPA, PIPL complied. For more details, please refer to the link: https://www.nexdata.ai/datasets/speechrecog/1393?source=Kaggle

Format

16kHz, 16bit, uncompressed wav, mono channel

Content category

Dialogue based on given topics

Recording condition

Low background noise (indoor)

Recording device

Android smartphone, iPhone

Country

The United Kingdom(GBK)

Language(Region) Code

en-GB

Language

English

Speaker

310 native speakers in total, 42% male and 58% female

Features of annotation

Transcription text, timestamp, speaker ID, gender, noise

Accuracy rate

Sentence accuracy rate(SAR) 95%

Licensing Information

Commercial License

People born in the ten most common non-English speaking background countries by SA2, 2011.

The data collected aim to test whether English proficiency levels in a country are positively associated with higher democratic values in that country. English proficiency is sourced from statistics by Education First’s "EF English Proficiency Index" which covers countries' scores for the calendar year 2022 and 2021. The EF English Proficiency Index ranks 111 countries in five different categories based on their English proficiency scores that were calculated from the test results of 2.1 million adults. While democratic values are operationalized through the liberal democracy index from the V-Dem Institute annual report for 2022 and 2021. Additionally, the data is utilized to test whether English language media consumption acts as a mediating variable between English proficiency and democracy levels in a country, while also looking at other possible regression variables. In order to conduct the linear regression analyses for the dats, the software that was utilized for this research was Microsoft Excel.The raw data set consists of 90 nation states in two years from 2022 and 2021. The raw data is utilized for two separate data sets the first of which is democracy indicators which has the regression variables of EPI, HDI, and GDP. For this table set there is a total of 360 data entries. HDI scores are a statistical summary measure that is developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) which measures the levels of human development in 190 countries. The data for nominal gross domestic product scores (GDP) are sourced from the World Bank. Having strong regression variables that have been proven to have a positive link with democracy in the data analysis such as GDP and HDI, would allow the regression analysis to identify whether there is a true relationship between English proficiency and democracy levels in a country. While the second data set has a total of 720 data entries and aims to identify English proficiency indicators the data set has 7 various regression variables which include, LDI scores, Years of Mandatory English Education, Heads of States Publicly speaking English, GDP PPP (2021USD), Common Wealth, BBC web traffic and CNN web traffic. The data for years of mandatory English education is sourced from research at the University of Winnipeg and is coded in the data set based on the number of years a country has English as a mandatory subject. The range of this data is from 0 to 13 years of English being mandatory. It is important to note that this data only concerns public schools and does not extend to the private school systems in each country. The data for heads of state publicly speaking English was done through a video data analysis of all heads of state. The data was only used for heads of state who had been in their position for at least a year to ensure the accuracy of the data collected; with a year in power, for heads of state that had not been in their position for a year, data was taken from the previous head of state. This data only takes into account speeches and interviews that were conducted during their incumbency. The data for each country’s GDP PPP scores are sourced from the World Bank, which was last updated for a majority of the countries in 2021 and is tied to the US dollar. Data for the commonwealth will only include members of the commonwealth that have been historically colonized by the United Kingdom. Any country that falls under that category will be coded as 1 and any country that does not will be coded as 0. For BBC and CNN web traffic that data is sourced by using tools in Semrush which provide a rough estimate of how much web traffic each news site generates in each country. Which will be utilized to identify the average number of web traffic for BBC News and CNN World News for both the 2021 and 2022 calendar. The traffic for each country will also be measured per capita, per 10 thousand people to ensure that the population density of a country does not influence the results. The population of each country for both 2021 and 2022 is sourced from the United Nations revision of World Population Prospects of both 2021 and 2022 respectively.

This study, which was part of the Review of the Provision of Language Services in Australia, had as its principal aims: the assessment of community needs for language services, access to and knowledge of services and demand levels; the construction of a comprehensive picture of language services currently provided; an investigation of services available in individual areas; the highlighting of duplication and areas where language services were not meeting community needs; and the exploration of options for improvement in language service delivery. This survey is a companion to two other surveys: the survey of language service providers (see SSDA Study No. 592) and the survey of community service providers (see SSDA Study No. 593). Topic areas covered in the survey included: language first spoken; migration information including sponsorship details and place of residence on arrival; ability to speak English on arrival; attendance at language classes and reasons for non-attendance, correspondence courses and private language coaching; role of the media in learning English; availability of printed material in first language; problems in locating accommodation and employment, and other personal problems as a newly arrived migrant; need for and use of interpreting services in the previous twelve months, including reasons for not using services; awareness of interpreting services provided by government agencies; and need for and use of translating services. Background information was collected on country of birth of parents, and respondent's country of birth and citizenship; age; sex; household composition; occupation and industry of respondent and partner; and an interviewer assessment of the respondent's spoken English