Four times as many people speak English as a second language than there are native speakers

Approximately 1.5 billion people on Earth speak English. Of those 1.5 billion, approximately 400 million are native English speakers, meaning that they speak English as their first language. There are almost four times as many people who speak English as a second language and as a learned language than there are people who speak English as a native language. That means that there are approximately 1.2 billion people on Earth who speak English as a second language. It is the most widely used second language in the world.