From Mother Tongue - English & How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson:

In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, a largely Muslim city seemingly as remote from English-speaking culture as any place in Europe, you can find graffiti saying HEAVY METAL IS LAW! and HOOLIGAN KINGS OF THE NORTH! In the Europa Hotel in the same city, you will find this message on every door: "Guests should announce the abandonment of theirs rooms before 12 o'clock, emptying the room at the latest until 14 o'clock, for the use .of the room before 5 at the arrival or after the 16 o'clock at the departure, will be billed as one night more." Is that clear? In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.

I bring this up here to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is the most global of languages. Products are deemed to be more exciting if they carry English messages even when, as often happens, the messages don't make a lot of sense. I have before me a Japanese eraser, which says: "Mr. Friendly Quality Eraser. Mr. Friendly Arrived!! He always stay near you, and steals in your mind to lead you a good situation." On the bottom of the eraser is a further message: "We are ecologically minded. This package will self-destruct in Mother Earth." It is a product that was made in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese on it.

Coke cans in Japan come with the slogan I FEEL COKE & SOUND SPECIAL. A correspondent of The Economist spotted a T-shirt in Tokyo that said: O.D. ON BOURGEOISIE MILK BOY MILK. A shopping bag carried a picture of dancing elephants above the legend: ELEPHANT FAMILY ARE HAPPY WITH US. THEIR HUMMING MAKES US FEEL HAPPY. Some of these items betray a distinct, and yet somehow comforting, lack of geographical precision. A shopping bag showing yachts on a blue sea had the message SWITZERLAND: SEASIDE CITY. A range of products manufactured by a company called Cream Soda all used to bear the splendidly vacuous message "Too fast to live, too young to happy." Then some spoilsport informed the company of its error and the second half of the message was changed to "too young to die." What is perhaps most worrying is that these meaningless phrases on clothing are invading the English-speaking world. I recently saw in a London store a jacket with bold lettering that said: RODEO-l00% BOYS FOR ATOMIC ATLAS. The jacket was made in Britain. Who by? Who for?

So how many people in the world speak English? That's hard to say. We're not even sure how many native speakers there are. Different authorities put the number of people who speak English as a first language at anywhere between 300 million and 400 million. That may seem sloppily imprecise, but there are some sound reasons for the vagueness. In the first place, it is not simply a matter of taking all the English-speaking countries in the world and adding up their populations. America alone has forty million people who don't speak English-about the same as the number of people in England who do speak English. Then there is the even thornier problem of deciding whether a person is speaking English or something that is like English but is really a quite separate language. This is especially true of the many English-based creoles in the world, such as Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, and Neo-Melanesian (sometimes called Tok Pisin), spoken in Papua New Guinea. According to Dr. Loreto Todd of Leeds University in England, the world has sixty-one such creoles spoken by up to zoo million people-enough to make the number of English speakers soar, if you consider them English speakers.

A second and rather harsher problem is deciding whether a person speaks English or simply thinks he speaks it. I have before me a brochure from the Italian city of Urbino, which contains a dozen pages of the most gloriously baroque and impenetrable English prose, lavishly garnished with misspellings, unexpected hyphenations, and twisted grammar. A brief extract: "The integrity and thus the vitality of Urbino is no chance, but a conservation due to the factors constituted in all probability by the approximate framework of the unity of the country, the difficulty od [sic] communications, the very concentric pattern of hill sistems or the remoteness from hi-ghly developed areas, the force of the original design proposed in its construction, with the means at the disposal of the new sciences of the Renaissance, as an ideal city even." It goes on like that for a dozen pages. There is scarcely a sentence that makes even momentary sense. I daresay that if all the people in Italy who speak English were asked to put up their hands, this author's arms would be one of the first to fly up, but whether he can fairly be said to speak English is, to put it charitably, moot.