From AskOxford.com:

"English is spoken as a first language by more than 300 million people throughout the world, and used as a second language by many millions more. One in five of the world's population speaks English with a good level of competence, and within the next few years the number of people speaking English as a second language will exceed the number of native speakers."

Good gracious. The above paragraph makes me exceedingly grateful that the one language I do speak is English.

However, the fact that English is my first language has undoubtedly hindered my learning of other languages - the popularity of English has perhaps made us a bit dismissive about the value of knowing other languages. Where many European countries start second language classes in elementary school, we finally started French at the end of junior high! I remember a classmate's parents being absolutely furious back in grade 9 when we had to take French. They thought it was a waste of time and didn't want her to learn it. And that's in Canada, where French is an official language! Sure, it's not spoken much in the west, but good heavens, should you ever want to travel your own country, it would be very helpful!

I do have to laugh at myself, though - I moved to Europe for a variety of reasons, one of which was to immerse myself in a new language in hopes of picking it up. But because I don't like change and still needed to try and work for a living, I ended up in the Netherlands. The vast majority of people speak English here and there are only maybe 21 million (a) Dutch speakers in the whole world.

Ah well, the Dutch is actually coming along, at least. I was pleased last week that I could understand most of the membership renewal letter sent to me by the library.