There are thousands of languages in the world. Each language seems to be the most important to those who speak it as their native language. This is not strange at all, seeing that it is the language they learned at their mothers" knees and may be the only language many of them will ever know all their lives.

The importance of a language can be judged according to several things. The first is the number of native speakers that a language happens to have. The second is how widely the native speakers are distributed over the world. Next comes the cultural, economic and political influence of those who speak it as their mother tongue.

There can be no doubt now that English is one of the world"s most widely used languages. People use a language in three ways: as a native language, as a second language, or as a foreign language. English is spoken as a native language by nearly 300 million people: in the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, some Caribbean countries, and South Africa. As a second language, English is often necessary for official business, education, information and other activities in a great many countries such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Singapore, and the Philippines. It is one of the few "working" languages of the United Nations and is more frequently used than the others