For some, an international language is equated with a language that has a large number of native speakers. In this sense, Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic, the five most widely spoken mother tongues in the world today, might be considered as international languages. However, unless such languages are spoken by a large number of native speakers of other languages, the language cannot serve as a language of wider communication. It is in this sense, as a language of wider communication, that English is the international language par excellence. And in many instances, it is a language of wider communication both among individuals from different countries and between individuals from one country. In this way, English is an international language in both a global and a local sense. Crystal (1997) maintains that a language achieves global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country and that this special status can be achieved either by making it an official language of the country or by a country giving special priority to the language by requiring study of it as a foreign language. Today there are over seventy countries where English has held or continues to hold special status, with many other countries giving English the special priority referred to by Crystal where English is a required foreign language. A variety of difficulties exist in getting an accurate count of the current number of English users. First, there is no single source of statistical information on totals of English language users of all countries in the world so estimates have to be made from a variety of sources. Second, how fluent an individual must be to be considered as “a user of English” is open to interpretation. Finally, there are many varieties of the language, ranging from pidgins and creoles to various varieties of Standard English, and whether or not to include pidgin and creole speakers in estimates of English users is a subject of debate. Whereas the exact number of users of English is difficult to determine, it is clear that the number of individuals who have some familiarity with the language is vast and growing. However, the number of speakers is not the defining characteristic of an international language. Other features need to be taken into account as well.