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English language
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English
Pronunciation /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]
Region British Isles (originally)
Worldwide
Native speakers 360–400 million[2]
L2 speakers: 400 million;
as a foreign language: 600–700 million{
Language family Indo-European
 Germanic
o West Germanic
 Anglo-Frisian
 Anglic
o English
Early forms Old English
 Middle English
o Early Modern English
Writing system  Latin script (English alphabet)
 English Braille, Unified English Braille
Signed forms Manually coded English
(multiple systems)
Official status
Official language in  67 countries
 27 non-sovereign entities
Expand
Various organisations
Language codes
ISO 639-1 en
ISO 639-2 eng
ISO 639-3 eng
Glottolog stan1293
Linguasphere 52-ABA

Countries of the world where English is a majority native language

 Countries where English is official but not a majority native language
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other
symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
English is a language that started in Anglo-Saxon England. It is originally from Anglo-Frisian and
Old Saxon dialects. English is now used as a global language. There are about 375 million native
speakers (people who use it as their first language) in the world. [3]

Frisian is the language closest to English. The vocabulary of English was influenced by other
Germanic languages in the early Middle Ages and later by Romance languages, especially
French.
English is the only official language or one of the official languages of nearly 60 countries. It is
also the main language of more countries in the world than any other. It is the primary
language in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand. It is one of the official languages in Singapore, India, Hong Kong, and South Africa. It is
widely spoken in parts of the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia.
In 2005, it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English. English is the first
[4]

foreign language for most learners who have another main language. It is an official language of
the United Nations, European Union, and many other international organizations. It is the most
widely-spoken Germanic language, with at least 70% of Germanic speakers speaking English.
About 220 million others use it as their second language. It is, together with German, the most
important language of science and technology. It is often used in work and travel and trade, and
there are at least a billion people who are learning it. That makes English the largest language
by number of speakers.

EN language code (ISO 639-1)

English has changed and developed over time, like all other languages. The most obvious [5]

changes are the many words taken from Latin and Old French, which then came to Old English
and then Modern English, which is used today.
English grammar has also become very different from other Germanic languages, but it stayed
different from Romance languages. Because nearly 60% of the vocabulary comes from Latin,
English is sometimes called the Germanic language that is the most Latin, and it is often
mistaken for being a Romance language. [6]

Contents
 1History
 2Grammar
o 2.1Nouns
o 2.2Pronouns
o 2.3Verbs
o 2.4Adjectives
  3Spelling
 4Alphabets
 5Vocabulary
 6Related pages
 7References
 8Other websites

History[change | change source]

Germanic tribes (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) came to Britain from around 449 AD. They made
their home in the south and east of the island, pushing out the Celtic Britons who were there
before them, or making them speak the English language instead of the old Celtic languages.
Some people still speak Celtic languages today, in Wales (Welsh) and elsewhere. Gaelic is the
Scottish Celtic language, still spoken by some in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. "Scots" is a
dialect of English, taken from the English spoken in Northumbria. Irish Gaelic is spoken by very
few people today.
The Germanic dialects of the different tribes became what is now called Old English. The word
"English" comes from the name of the Angles: Englas. Old English did not sound or look much
like the English spoken today. If English speakers today were to hear or read a passage in Old
English, they would understand just a few words.
The closest language to English that is still used today is Frisian, spoken by about 500,000
people living in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. It is much like English, and many
words are the same. The two languages were even closer before Old English changed to Middle
English). Today, speakers of the two languages would not be able to understand each other.
Dutch is spoken by over 20 million people, and is more distant from English. German is even
bigger, and even more distant. All these languages belong to the same West Germanic family as
English.
Many other people came to England later at different times, speaking different languages, and
these languages added more words to make today's English. For example, around 800 AD,
many Danish and Norse pirates, also called Vikings, came to the country, established Danelaw.
So, English got many Norse loanwords. Their languages were Germanic languages, like Old
English, but are a little different. They are called the North Germanic languages.
When William the Conqueror took over England in 1066 AD, he brought his nobles, who spoke
Norman, a language closely related to French. English changed a lot because it was mostly
being spoken instead of written for about 300 years, because all official documents were
written in Norman French. English borrowed many words from Norman at that time, and also
began to drop the old word endings. English of this time is called Middle English. Geoffrey
Chaucer is a well known writer of Middle English. After more sound changes, Middle English
became Modern English.
English continued to take new words from other languages, for example mainly from French
(around 30% to 40% of its words), but also Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Japanese, Dutch, Spanish,
Portuguese, etc. Because scientists from different countries needed to talk to one another, they
chose names for scientific things in the languages they all knew: Greek and Latin. Those words
came to English also, for example, photography ("photo-" means "light" and "-graph" means
"picture" or "writing", in Greek. A photograph is a picture made using light), or telephone. So,
[7]

English is made of Old English, Danish, Norse, and French, and has been changed by Latin,
Greek, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Dutch and Spanish, along with some words from other
languages.
English grammar has also changed, becoming simpler and less Germanic. The classic example is
the loss of case in grammar. Grammatical case shows the role of a noun, adjective or pronoun
in a sentence. In Latin (and other Indo-European languages), this is done by adding suffixes, but
English usually does not. The style of English is that meaning is made clear more by context and
syntax.
The history of the British Empire has added to the spread of English. English is an important
language in many places today. In Australia, Canada, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and the
United States, among others (like those in the Commonwealth of Nations), English is the main
language. Because the United Kingdom (the country where England is) and the United States
have historically been powerful in commerce and government, many people find it helpful to
learn English to communicate in science, business, and diplomacy. This is called learning English
as an additional language, English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language
(EFL).
English literature has many famous stories and plays. William Shakespeare was a famous
English writer of poems and plays. His English is Early Modern English, and not quite like what
people speak or write today. Early Modern English sounded different, partly because the
language was beginning a "great vowel shift". Later, many short stories and novels also used
English. The novel as we know it is first seen in 18th century English. Therefore today, many
[8]

famous songs and movies (cinema films) use the English language.
Grammar[change | change source]
Main article: English grammar
English grammar started out based on Old English, which is considered to be a Germanic
language. After the Norman French conquered England in 1066, parts of the Latin language
were brought to the English language by the Norman French.
Nouns[change | change source]
There are different types of nouns in English like proper or common noun. To show if a noun is
plural (to talk about more than one thing) we usually add a -s as suffix. [9]
Pronouns[change | change source]
Pronouns are words that take the place of a noun to avoid repetition. There are different types
of pronouns in English language. The most important ones are:

 Personal pronouns
 Demonstrative pronouns
 Relative pronouns
 Interrogative pronouns
 Indefinite pronouns
 Dummy pronouns [10]

Verbs[change | change source]

Verbs in English show the action or the state of a sentence. Verbs can come in different shapes
in a sentence based on the time or condition we are talking about. For example the verb "eat"
changes to "ate" in past. [11]

Adjectives[change | change source]

Adjectives are words that describe a noun. In English they always come before a noun to give
you more information about that noun. You can see this in the sentence "the red apples are
juicy."
Spelling[change | change source]
Written English uses a range of historical spelling patterns that changed over time due to
political and cultural changes. As a result, different words can use the same letters and
combinations for very different sounds. For example, "-ough" was once a guttural but has
become different in "through" (threw), "rough" (ruff), "dough" (doe) or "cough" (coff).
[12][13]

Many English-speaking countries spell words differently. Some words are spelled differently in
the United States from in the United Kingdom and many other countries and others of the
British Commonwealth, where English is the main language. The different ways of spelling are
sometimes called "American English" and "British English". For example, "colour" is spelled
"color" in American English, and "programme" is spelled "program". Even the word "spelled" is
different in British English, which uses "spelt".
Alphabets[change | change source]
Main article: English alphabet

The English Alphabet consists of 26 letters:-

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
Vocabulary[change | change source]

Influences on English vocabulary

Nearly 60% of the vocabulary in the English language comes from Latin and its descendents,
mainly French:
 Langue d'oïl (French): 29.3%
 Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin and Frankish (Germanic language):
28.7%
 Germanic languages: 24% (inherited from Old English/Anglo-Saxon, Proto-Germanic, Old
Norse, etc. without including Germanic words borrowed from a Romance languages)
 Greek: 5.32%
 Italian, Spanish and Portuguese: 4.03%
 Derived from proper names: 3.28%
 All other languages: less than 1%
However, the most common words are more often those of Germanic origin. Also, expressions
and typical short phrases are often of Germanic origin.
Related pages[change | change source]
 Indian English
 American English
 Australian English
 British English
 Canadian English
 Jamaican English
 South African English
 New Zealand English
 Pakistani English
 Scottish English

References[change | change source]

1. ↑ Oxford 2015, Entry: English – Pronunciation.
2. ↑ Crystal, David (ed) 2005. The Penguin Concise Encyclopedia. London: Penguin Reference, pp. 424–426.
3. ↑ Curtis, Andy. Color, race, and English language teaching: shades of meaning. 2006, page 192.
4. ↑ Crystal, David 2008. Two thousand million?. English Today. 24(1): 3–6. [1]
5. ↑ Baugh, Albert C. & Cable, Thomas 2012. A history of the English language. 6th ed, London: Routledge. ISBN 0-41-
565596-X
6. ↑ "Comparison between English, German and Dutch (in Italian)". Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved
2013-06-01.
7. ↑ These words come mostly from Greek, but are translated into the Latin alphabet, which English uses.
8. ↑ Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London, 1957); John J. Richetti, Popular
Fiction before Richardson. Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (1969); Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the
English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of
Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990).
9. ↑ "What Is a Noun?". Nouns: Types of Nouns With Examples | Grammarly. 2017-03-21. Retrieved 2021-07-17.
10. ↑ "LanGeek | Pronouns in English Grammar". Langeek. Retrieved 2021-07-17.
11. ↑ "Eat Ate Eaten | Learn English". www.ecenglish.com. Retrieved 2021-07-17.
 12. ↑ Smith, Bridie (17 November 2009). "It's offishal - English iz darned hard to learn". The Age. Retrieved 29 November
2009.
13. ↑ Crystal, David (2012). Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling. New York:
Picador St. Martin's Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 9781250056122.

Other websites[change | change source]

English edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 BBC resources for English language students

 Resources for English language students
 The main points of English grammar, clearly presented with examples
 Activities for English language students
 Tools For English Language
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