Ireland is not the same as uk you know, english is the adopted language not the original. Though it has near completely overshadowed gaeilge (irish) not many native speakers left only a few regions
There are not that many people in Ireland (I think the population is a little under five million), so you only need 500,000 people to account for that 10%. Between immigrants and people whose first language is Irish, I'd think it's a very reasonable number to attain.
Taking this quiz in 2023, the number has been updated to 93%. Most of the remaining 7% would be explained by immigration, with hundreds of thousands of first-generation long-term residents or citizens whose first language is Polish, Lithuanian, (Brazilian) Portuguese, etc. The number of first-language (from childhood) speakers of Irish is tiny, and claims that 2% of the population have Irish as a first language should be treated with a degree of scepticism.
Many use it as an official language for the simple reason that SO many Indigenous languages exist that they just need a common de jure tongue for governance even though very few people speak it day to day.
Guyana and Belize are in the heart of Latin America. But glad I knew guys in the Army from those places. They were British enclaves in mainland Latin America. A lot of people don't know that.
First language. Afrikaans in South Africa and many native ethnic languages. Try the other quiz mentioned, "English Speaking Countries" as opposed to first language on this quiz.
Same here. I thought for sure the one I'd missed would be a Caribbean island or a singular African country that made it on here. But nope. Australia. I guess when I typed in New Zealand I assumed I'd already done Australia, but apparently not.
I did quite well on the Caribbean countries, missing only Grenada--and I considered it, but then assumed it was more likely Spanish. But I forgot Ireland!!! So BAD of me, especially considering I'm of partial Irish heritage.
Not really, actually. While English is the official language there, most of the population speak a form of French Creole as their first language. This is also the case with St. Lucia, another Caribbean country where English is also the official language.
Am I the only one who finds it odd that the percentage of Canadians who speak English as a first language is given as 57%? I know that French is the predominant language in Québec, and that there's a large immigrant population, but 57% seems very low.
~22% of the Canadian population is made up of immigrants... which would add up to basically equal 100%
Its true that there are probably many English and French speaking immigrants. But on the other hand, many children (of immigrants, or other) learn their parents' or family's language before they learn English or French, making it their first language.
I don't know if the two of those cancel each other out, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
Please forgive me if any of this doesn't make sense or the math doesn't add up... I just got my wisdom teeth out and I still have the anaesthetic in my system lol
Indigenous languages as well as languages spoken by immigrants make up something like 20% which leaves another 23% for French which I think is accurate so 57% seems feasible.
I doubt the Philippines have that many native English speakers. The relevant Wikipedia page doesn't even list English as part of natively spoken languages.
I suspect Singapore will land on this list in the next few years. Wikipedia (quoting Statistics Singapore) has English as the first language of 48.3% of Singaporeans, and it's growing rapidly: in 1990 that figure was only 18.8%. English is certainly the dominant language of Singapore, not only does it have a plurality of first-language speakers (having overtaken Mandarin in the last decade), but it is the lingua franca amongst Singaporeans generally, with the overwhelmingly majority of Singaporeans being able to speak it.
(Though to answer the question you're actually asking, South Africa isn't on this quiz because less than 10% of its population speak English as a first language, and the cutoff for this quiz is 50%.)
How do you distinguish between creole, dialect and proper English? Spend some time in a Newfoundland outport and you'll wonder why that's called English and Jamaican patois is called creole. Since English has plenty of accents or dialects some which are difficult for others to understand, why pick on the Caribbeans as creole and not dialects.
More specifically, Creoles are usually lexified by a coloniser language (English, French, Spanish etc), but their underlying grammar is claimed to be from West African language families. And the Creoles sprang up in very specific sets of circumstances (i.e. slavery) where groups of enslaved people who couldn't understand each other were often deliberately put together. Creoles were then the result of the next generation naturally reformulating communication attempts and pidgins into a grammatical system.
Dialects on the other hand may have influences from other languages or dialects, but form and develop over a much longer time scale, and aren't associated with critical situations like enslavement, and are usually much more grammatically similar to other dialects of the same 'parent' language.
and most countries in Europe speak english as a 2nd language, I don't know anyone who doesn't speak english
i.e. Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, etc..
"Name the countries where more than 50% speak English as a first language."
57% of the country speaks English
Around 21% speaks French
That adds up to about 78%
~22% of the Canadian population is made up of immigrants... which would add up to basically equal 100%
Its true that there are probably many English and French speaking immigrants. But on the other hand, many children (of immigrants, or other) learn their parents' or family's language before they learn English or French, making it their first language.
I don't know if the two of those cancel each other out, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
Please forgive me if any of this doesn't make sense or the math doesn't add up... I just got my wisdom teeth out and I still have the anaesthetic in my system lol
(Though to answer the question you're actually asking, South Africa isn't on this quiz because less than 10% of its population speak English as a first language, and the cutoff for this quiz is 50%.)
So proud of myself!
Singapore
South Africa
Nigeria
Dialects on the other hand may have influences from other languages or dialects, but form and develop over a much longer time scale, and aren't associated with critical situations like enslavement, and are usually much more grammatically similar to other dialects of the same 'parent' language.
I missed CANADA