English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in Anglo-Saxon England in the early Middle Ages. It is now the most widely used language in the world.^[4]

It is spoken in many countries around the world. It is the first language of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland,New Zealand and a number of Caribbean nations. There are about 375 million native speakers (people with first language as English),^[5] which will be the largest after Mandarin and Spanish. About 220 million more people speak it as a second language and it is often used in work and in travel, and there are as many as a billion people who are learning it, which makes English the second most spoken language as well as the most international one in the world.