Which statement correctly describes the spread of English as a global language?

Concept: A language is called a global language, or lingua franca, on the strength of what it does, not of what any law declares or of how many people are born into it. The defining test is functional: across many regions, speakers whose mother tongues differ choose it as their shared medium of contact. Breadth of contact use — not universal legal recognition, and not universal native speakership — is the criterion.

Application: English meets that functional test. Through colonial administration, and later through trade, science publishing, aviation and maritime protocol, higher education and the internet, it became the language people reach for when no other language is shared: a Japanese engineer and a Brazilian buyer negotiate in English although neither grew up speaking it. Most of its users today are second-language or foreign-language users, and mother-tongue speakers are a minority of the total. That is exactly the contact-language function.

Cross-check: Test the three absolute descriptions against the same criterion.

• Official in every country: official status is fixed state by state. France's constitution names French, the People's Republic of China names Putonghua, and Japan names no language by statute. English holds official or co-official status in roughly sixty states, including India, Nigeria and Singapore, so the designation is widespread but far from universal.

• Spoken by everyone as a first language: mother-tongue English speakers number about 370–400 million out of some 8 billion people. Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Hindi each have comparable or larger first-language populations, so English is a widely learned second language rather than a universal first language.

• The single global language: French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese are all official languages of the United Nations, and Arabic, Swahili and Russian each act as a lingua franca across their own regions. Wide contact use is therefore not exclusive to English.

So the accurate description is the functional one: English serves as a common language among speakers of different first languages. The remaining three descriptions are absolutes — about law, about birth and about exclusivity — that overstate what makes a language global.