English – which 10 words are the most important?

Though the exact number of languages may never be precisely determined, best estimates say that there are nearly 7000 languages and dialects spoken. Amazingly, 96% of them are spoken by a mere 4% of the planet's population. And half of the world's languages are spoken in only eight countries: Papua New Guinea (832), Indonesia (731), Nigeria (515), India (400), Mexico (295), Cameroon (286), Australia (268) and Brazil (234).

How many people speak English?
English ranks #4 in the world for number of native speakers, after Chinese, Hindi and Spanish. An estimated 380 million people have English as their mother tongue, and some 150 million to 1 billion speak English as their second language.

How many words are there?
An approximation from March 2006 counts 988,968 words in the English Language, plus or minus a handful. By comparison, there are said to be fewer than 100,000 words in French. 

The long and short of English words
English has a history of long words. Excluding scientific terms, which are notoriously long and not used by the general population, the longest words in English are:

floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters) and antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters).

Floccinaucinihilipilification, first used in 1741, means “the estimation of something as worthless”.  First used in the 1800s, antidisestablishmentarianism describes a movement from that period which opposed the removal of the Church of England as the state church.

Newcomers to English shouldn't be intimidated by those looooooong words though, because they are rarely used. In fact, 9 out of 10 most commonly used English words have no more than 3 letters. Here are the top 10!

1. The
2. Of
3. To
4. And
5. A
6. In
7. Is
8. It
9. You
10. That