The position of English in the world today (task C+, p.17)

Nowadays English is a very important and the most used language in the world. English is a native language to 340m speakers and the 2nd language to 375m people(715m speakers in all). Even that languages such as Chinese that have 873m native speakers and only 178m people use it as a second language (1,051m speakers in all), or Spanish which is an official language in many countries (420m speakers in all), English is still the lingua franca of the world. Moreover, the importance of an English we can see at the statistics that shows the number of articles in Wikipedia. There are 2,259,431 English articles in Wikipedia. In addition, English wins in Wikipedia with languages such as German (715,830 articles), French (629,004 articles), Polish (475,004 articles) or Japanese (472,691 articles), which are included in the top five in Wikipedia’s Database. Neverthelles, that shows the power of this language in the world.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

“A Dictionary of the English language” is the first dictionary of English, which was written by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, an English writer and lexicographer, born in Lichfield, England) and published on April 15, 1755. 

Johnson’s Dictionary is the most influential and the most famous lexicon in the world. The dictionary contains of 40,000 words, which are illustrated in details by 114,000 quotations. In addition, it took almost nine years to compile the dictionary. 

Sources:

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

-http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/johnson/1755johnsonsdictionary.html