He criticised cuts to English language teaching despite a rising proportion of children who are non-native speakers.
Belize now has more native speakers of Spanish than of English or its lilting cousin, Belizean Creole.
But the circuit of openings and dinners can tax the energy and good will of even native speakers.
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Strokes are often merged or omitted altogether, making characters difficult or impossible to read, even for native speakers.
True, native speakers generally regard the seven to 13 mostly mutually unintelligible variants as dialects of a single language.
And an iPad-only app, TOTALe Studio HD, lets you practice the language with native speakers during prescheduled video chats.
Many also incorporate technology such as YouTube videos of native speakers or Google Hangout video chats for live, long-distance conversations.
The only hope for English to remain the lingua franca till deathbed is a peaceful world and lots of love from non-native speakers.
This suggests that most Europeans are inclined to learn a language that provides universal communication quickly without being looked down on by native speakers.
The new law says local officials can use a "regional language" if at least 10% of the local population are native speakers of that language.
Twenty native speakers of Yucatec, Mexico's most widely spoken Mayan tongue, met last Thursday to help bring the language to Google, Mozilla and Wikimedia projects.
All the audio recordings have been made by native speakers, some of whom like Alfred "Bud" Lane are among the last fluent individuals in their native tongues.
The native speakers talked too fast and used mysterious expressions.
The number of areas of Wales where Welsh is the majority language - in north and west Wales - is still reducing, fuelling fears that the language may lose its capacity to produce new native speakers.
And yet, by some estimates, Esperanto still has more speakers than six thousand of the languages spoken around the world today, including approximately a thousand native speakers (among them George Soros) who learned it as their first language.
But is it inherently racist to say that there are social costs to immigration of high levels of people with less skills, who are not native speakers of English, and that as a society we'd rather not pay that cost?
The small handful of native Russian speakers present didn't want to give their full names.
Since many phishers are not native English speakers, they send out some pretty sloppy prose.
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Israelis call all native English speakers Anglo-Saxons, even American-born Jews of Russian descent.
About 36 percent of the New Yorkers expected to buy insurance through the exchanges won't be native English speakers, state officials estimate.
These elite performers actually do better than many native English speakers.
But the translations were done by native Russian speakers.
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Its leaders have downplayed culture to broaden their appeal to include immigrant groups and not just native French-speakers.
But most native English-speakers opt for Afrikaans, said to be easy to learn, rather than a useful but harder African tongue.
They studied bilingual programs in the Houston Independent School District and found that native-Spanish speakers were at or above grade level in English and Spanish in first grade through fifth grade.
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