Contents
English language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pronunciation: /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]
Spoken in: (see below)
Total speakers: First language: 309–400 million
Second language: 199–1,400 million[2][3]
Overall: 500 million–1.8 billion[4][3]
Ranking: 4 (native speakers)[5]
Total: 1 or 2 [6]
Language family: Indo-European
Germanic
West Germanic
Anglo–Frisian
Anglic
English
Writing system: Latin (English variant)
Official status
Official language in: 53 countries
United Nations
European Union
Commonwealth of Nations
Regulated by: No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the first language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the Anglophone Caribbean. It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language throughout the world, especially in Commonwealth countries and in many international organisations.
Historically English originated from the dialects, now called Old English, which were brought to England by Anglo-Saxon settlers, beginning in the 5th century. The language was heavily influenced by the Old Norse language of Viking invaders. The Norman conquest brought a stage called Middle English with heavy borrowing of vocabulary from Norman French and modernization of spelling conventions. Modern English continues to adopt foreign words, especially from Latin and Greek.
Significance
Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca,[7][8] is the dominant international language in communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy.[9] The initial reason for its enormous spread beyond the bounds of the British Isles, where it was originally a native tongue, was the British Empire, and by the late nineteenth century its reach was truly global.[10] It is the dominant language in the United States, whose growing economic and cultural influence and status as a global superpower since World War II have significantly accelerated adoption of English as a language across the planet.[8]
A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of fields, occupations and professions such as medicine and as a consequence over a billion people speak English to at least a basic level (see English language learning and teaching).
Linguists such as David Crystal recognize that one impact of this massive growth of English, in common with other global languages, has been to reduce native linguistic diversity in many parts of the world historically, most particularly in Australasia and North America, and its huge influence continues to play an important role in language attrition. By a similar token, historical linguists, aware of the complex and fluid dynamics of language change, are always alive to the potential English contains through the vast size and spread of the communities that use it and its natural internal variety, such as in its creoles and pidgins, to produce a new family of distinct languages over time.[citation needed]
English is one of six official languages of the United Nations.
History
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Lower Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Northern Netherlands[citation needed]. One of these German tribes were the Angles,[11] who may have come from Angeln, and Bede wrote that their whole nation came to Britain, [12] leaving their former land empty. The names 'England' (or 'Aenglaland') and English are derived from from the name of this tribe.
The Anglo Saxons began invading around 449 AD from the regions of Denmark and Jutland,[13][14] Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England the native population spoke Brythonic, a Celtic language. [15] Although the most significant changes in dialect occurred after the Norman invasion of 1066, the language retained its name and the pre-Norman invasion dialect is now known as Old English.[16]
Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Great Britain[citation needed]. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion. The first was by language speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonized parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language in the strict linguistic sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical supplementation of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Italic branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary.
The emergence and spread of the British Empire and the emergence of the United States as a superpower helped to spread the English language around the world.
Classification and related languages
The English language belongs to the western sub-branch of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The closest living relative of English is Scots, spoken primarily in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland, which is viewed by linguists as either a separate language or a group of dialects of English. The next closest relative to English after Scots is Frisian, spoken in the Northern Netherlands and Northwest Germany, followed by the other West Germanic languages (Dutch and Afrikaans, Low German, German), and then the North Germanic languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese). With the exception of Scots, none of these languages are mutually intelligible with English, because of divergences in lexis, syntax, semantics, and phonology.[citation needed]
Lexical differences with the other Germanic languages arise predominately because of the heavy usage of Latin (for example, "exit", vs. Dutch uitgang) and French ("change" vs. German Änderung, "movement" vs. German Bewegung) words in English. The syntax of German and Dutch is also significantly different from English, with different rules for setting up sentences (for example, German Ich habe noch nie etwas auf dem Platz gesehen, vs. English "I have still never seen anything in the square"). Semantics causes a number of false friends between English and its relatives. Phonology differences obscure words which actually are genetically related ("enough" vs. German genug), and sometimes both semantics and phonology are different (German Zeit, "time", is related to English "tide", but the English word has come to mean gravitational effects on the ocean by the moon).[citation needed]