English as a Global Language
language took place at the end of the sixteenth century. At that time, the number of mother-
tongue English speakers in the world is thought to have been 400 million and more, almost all
of them living in the British Isles.“Between the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1603) and the
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beginning of the reign of Elizabeth II (1952), this figure increased almost fiftyfold, to some
250 million, the vast majority living outside the British Isles... ” [3, p.30]
Then, in the eighteenth century, there was a vast wave of immigration from northern
Ireland. The Irish had been migrating to America from around 1600, but the main movements
took place during the 1720s, when around 50,000 Irish and Scots-Irish immigrants arrived. It
was not only England which influenced the directions that the English language was to take in
America, and later the USA
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