Please disregard my previous message (quoted below).
I misunderstood the statement I was trying to respond to.
Sorry.
In a message dated 10/8/2003 6:30:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
AmateurLinguist@AOL.COM writes:
>In a message dated 10/8/2003 1:37:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:
>>In the modern world, English is the L1 of about a quarter of its
>>population
>Isn't that an overestimate? The 2002 World Almanac (relying on SIL's
>ethnologue) estimates 341 million L1 English speakers, out of a total world
>population of about 6 billion. That's under 6%.