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Estimates of the number of English speakers who are second language and foreign-language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1,000 million depending on how proficiency is defined. A much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English sas a second language for education, government, or domestic business, and where English is routinely used for school instruction and official interactions with the government.
Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English based to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English in the process of growing up through day by day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by speakers who are not native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners.
Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries. They may have grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard of English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries. In the three model, countries such as Poland, China, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries where English is taught as foreign language make up the "expanding circle".
The distinctions between English as a first language, as a second language, and as a foreign language are often debatable and may change in particular countries over time. For example, in the Netherlands and some other countries of Europe, knowledge of English as a second language id nearly universal, with over 80 percent of the population able to use it. Thus English is routinely used to communicate worth foreigners and often in higher education.