I will admit that I've always thought those estimates I mention seemed on the low side - they must either set their standards very high, or basically ignore all the English speakers in countries where English isn't used as a lingua franca (within the country, that is - the countries of Kachru's "Expanding Circle", basically).

On the other hand, young Europeans will very likely overestimate just how universally accepted English is as a lingua franca - even within Europe, the generational gap is massive.

Meh. Just because such an organization exists doesn't mean it's taken all that seriously - the French have a few institutions that try to proscribe which words are and aren't French, but that doesn't mean the average French native speaker will adhere to those judgements. I do however agree that English is more strongly multi-polar, so to speak, than French or to a lesser extent Spanish - there are more generally accepted separate varieties, and there isn't one variety that dominates all the rest thanks to the continued importance of both the UK and the US.

Yes, but I think you'll find that distinct accents are nearly always accompanied by at least marginal differences in vocabulary. At least in the UK where the dialects are older, or here in Flanders.

I quite agree on the World Series, as you might expect. It goes beyond baseball - other sports like basketball also have an unfortunate, and frankly bizarre, tendency of occasionally referring to its champions as "world champions". A team may be the best in the world and yet not become world champion; ask the USA's unfortunate women's "soccer" team of 2011 (I have rarely seen a football game in which one side was so dominant and still managed to lose).

To get back to the topic at hand, I actually quite agree with Kachru's view that you brought up: that for purposes of counting varieties of English, those of the "Outer Circle" might qualify, but the English spoken by the "Expanding Circle" not so much.

I'm hardly an expert on the matter, it's not like I have plenty of examples ready. Check out the Wikipedia page on Kenyan English to get an idea. Of course more highly educated people will still speak something closer to British English, or at least with fewer turns of phrase that an American/Briton would view as ungrammatical. Differences can be small, to be sure - I speak or email with South Africans on a near-daily basis, and the list of particularly distinctive words or expressions that I've noticed is no more than five or so words. But it rapidly grows when you get into code-switching and the insertion of words from the local language in English, as people do basically everywhere in Africa.

The ironic thing about the prevalence of non-native English as lingua franca, is that Britons or Americans may actually find themselves being less proficient in this language than Europeans (or any other group) themselves, because they have a hard time realizing which words or expressions of their native language are widely understood, and which not so much. Even I find that speaking and writing English at a higher level than most of my colleagues (thanks in no small part to this site and wotmania) can actually be a handicap rather than an asset, since the vast majority of people I communicate with professionally are non-native speakers whose English is sometimes quite basic. I have colleagues who are understood more easily precisely because their English is not as good.

Just for the record, Belgium's ranking is due to an awkward average between Flanders, which I'd estimate somewhere around the #5 rank, and Wallonia which is often said to be even worse than France. Though they are improving. I have some other doubts about that list, though; anyone who's visited both Lisbon and Madrid will express very serious doubts about Spain ranking anywhere near Portugal, nevermind actually above it.

Do you have any source for the 70% of internet exchanges number? It seems highly unlikely to be honest.

But yes, as mentioned above, I do agree that those estimates seem low, and that they can't possibly be right if you lower the bar to the level of "can carry on a conversation in English". The thing is of course that truly massive percentages of the world population, perhaps even a majority, knows at least a few words in English. But for many of them, "a few words" is really all there is to it. That can't be said of any other language, so in that sense English is undisputably the "lingua franca" of the world. But it does not necessarily follow that English has more actual speakers than Chinese (though I'm inclined to agree it almost certainly does, if you don't put the bar unreasonably high).

Some countries won't come anywhere near 10%, and would be lucky to reach 1%. But yes, point taken.

If you count it as a single "dialect", then yes, no doubt. Don't think it makes much sense to do that, though.

It might be worth considering how well African residents are represented on Wikipedia compared to US residents, though. And I don't think Africa outnumbers the US in amount of English speakers, either, though it might come close.

Fair enough, I guess.

Just as long as we're clear that no, all the non-native speakers of the world do not speak British English.