English is a language mostly used internationally

[GoodTaste]

Are (1) and (2) natural in English?

(1) English is a language mostly used internationally.

(2) English is the language used most frequently in the world.

 

[GoesStation]

They're both grammatically correct. I don't know what "used internationally" is supposed to mean in sentence one.

Sentence two is grammatically correct and logical, but it's far from true. Chinese is generally considered the most-used language by a wide margin.

 

[emsr2d2]

Are you talking about the language spoken by the largest number of people (Chinese) or about the language most commonly used by people from different countries in order to communicate with each other (English)?

 

[Glizdka]

NOT A TEACHER
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Hello, GoodTaste!

It all depends on what you want to communicate. There are a few options I can think of:

A) The global population of speakers.
B) The population of people who speak English as a second language.
C) The number of countries in which English is spoken as either the first or the second language by more than an arbitrary percentage of the population.
D) How often conversations between people from different countries are in English.
E) How many words spoken by every person in the world per hour are in English compared to other languages.

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Mandarin has a huge population of native speakers, but English has a ginormous population of foreigners who can speak it as a second language.

Is "English is the most widely spoken language in the world" correct if I mean C, D?

 

[Tarheel]

It's true that there are a lot of Chinese speakers. However, the vast majority of them are in China. Speakers of English are spread all over the world.