XPost: comp.lang.c++   
   From: david.brown@hesbynett.no   
      
   On 02/02/2026 15:36, James Kuyper wrote:   
   > On 2026-02-02 05:27, David Brown wrote:   
   >> On 02/02/2026 01:11, James Kuyper wrote:   
   > ...   
   >>> The US has three times as many native speakers of English than the   
   >>> entire rest of the world combined, including the entire British   
   >>> Commonwealth.   
   >>   
   >> There are about 400 million native English speakers around the world, of   
   >> which about 230 are in the USA.  Of course any such numbers will be   
   >> estimates, with surveys being from different years, but it certainly   
   >> looks like you overestimate the numerical ratios.   
   >   
   > I looked at the Wikipedia article on English (language), which says that   
   > US has 244,079,241 native speakers of English, and that the world has   
   > 391,286,346. When I did the calculations last night, that, came out to   
   > 75%, but for some reason it's 62% this morning. Perhaps I shouldn't post   
   > that late at night.   
      
   I also got my numbers from Wikipedia.  I think there are a variety of   
   numbers, depending on the dates and the source of the numbers.   
      
   > It's still more US speakers than non-US speakers.   
      
   For native speakers, all the numbers I have seen support that, yes.  But   
   native speakers are not the numbers of interest here.  Native English   
   speakers will, for the most part, have their locales and settings for   
   their locale English variant.   
      
   But this is all getting wildly off-topic for these newsgroups, and I   
   don't think we are likely to get anything but speculation and anecdotal   
   examples.  My speculation is that the reason non-native English users   
   might be more likely to pick US locales than anything else is simply   
   that it is the default for a lot of software and OS's, and it's usually   
   not difficult to change things like paper sizes manually.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)