International English the sphere of influence of English-speaking countries. Here English may serve as a useful lingua franca between ethnic and language groups. Higher education, the legislature and judiciary, national commerce, and so on, may all be carried out predominantly in English. The "expanding circle" refers to those countries where English has no official role, but is nonetheless important for certain functions, e.g. international business and tourism. By the twenty-first century, non-native English speakers have come to outnumber native speakers by a factor of three, according to the British Council. Darius Degher, a professor at Malmö University in Sweden, uses the term
Macaronic language Macaronic language Macaronic language refers to text using a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different languages). The term can also denote hybrid words, which are effectively "internally macaronic". A rough equivalent in spoken language is code-switching, a term in linguistics referring to using more than one language or dialect within the same conversation. Macaronic Latin in particular is a jumbled jargon made up of vernacular words given Latin endings, or of Latin words mixed with the