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
Mixed language cases, mixed language speakers are fluent, even native, speakers of both languages; however, speakers of Michif (a N-V mixed language) are unique in that many are not fluent in both of the sources languages. Pidgins, on the other hand, develop in a situation, usually in the context of trade, where speakers of two (or more) different languages come into contact and need to find some way to communicate with each other. Creoles develop when a pidgin language becomes a first language for young speakers. While creoles tend to have drastically simplified morphologies, mixed languages often retain the inflectional complexities of