While English has around 400 million native speakers, it is the most widely spoken second language in the world. Its non-native speakers are estimated from 470 million to a billion, a number that far exceeds its native speakers. English is a West Germanic language, most closely related to Frisian, spoken in the edges of Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands that border the North Sea. Unfortunately, the global dominance of English is in part responsible for language attrition and the reduction of linguistic diversity in many parts of the world.
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