English
Welcome
Welcome
Introduction
English belongs to the Western group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is most closely related to Low German dialects in northern Germany and to Dutch, sharing with them the absence of the Second Sound Shift which occurred around 600 AD.
English is descended from the language spoken in the English Isles by the Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who came to the British Isles around 450 AD and drove the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants to areas that are 
now Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by these invaders formed the basis of Old English, which was also strongly influenced by Old Norse, spoken by the Viking invaders of the 8th-9th centuries.
For the 300 years after the Norman Conquest in 1066, the kings of England spoke only French. During this time, a large number of French words were assimilated into Old English, which also lost most of its inflections. The resulting language is known as Middle English. The most famous surviving work from Old and Middle English are Beowulf and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
Around 1500, the Great Vowel Shift marked the transition from Middle English to Modern English.
Click here to learn more about the Great Vowel Shift.
According to Ethnologue, English has 341 million native speakers, which makes it the third- or fourth-largest native language in the world after Mandarin Chinese (874 million), Hindi (366 million), and Spanish (between 322 and 358 million). Some estimates (Global Reach) put the number of native speakers of English at over 500 million, but there is no reliable way to verify the number. Estimates of the number of second-language speakers of English vary widely as well, from 500 million to 1 billion.
English has a wider dispersion than any other language in the world, due to the political, economic, scientific, and cultural influence first of England and later of the United States. Countries using English as either a first or a second language are located on all five continents, and the total population of these countries amounts to close to half of the world's population. It is the official or national language of 52 countries, among them U.K. and Commonwealth Countries, and the U.S. and its territories.
Click here for a complete list.
English enjoys a dominant Internet presence, accounting for 35.8% of the world's online 
population, as estimated by Global Reach.
English is now the most widely studied second language in the world because a working knowledge of English is required in many fields and occupations as well as for international communication. English loanwords now appear in many languages, especially in the fields of technology and culture, and international terminology is dominated by English words.
Dialects
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English spread from Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries to North America, the Caribbean, and northern Ireland; and in the 18th and 19th centuries to South Asia and Africa. With the settlers separated from England, the regional Englishes began to develop in their own unique ways. With the passage of time, they became increasingly more differentiated from each other and from their ancestral British English. English has bred a large number of English-based creoles and pidgins. One can no longer think of English as one unitary language, instead the concept of world Englishes is much more appropriate. Problems of world Englishes are widely discussed by scholars from around the world. |
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Structure
Sound System
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Spoken English has a wide variation in its pronunciation. The number of speech sounds in English varies from dialect to dialect as well. The differences affect vowels and diphthongs more than consonants. Vowels
Consonants
Stress
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law
ladder
are
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English grammar is Germanic-based, but English is less inflected than other Germanic languages, expressing most grammatical information through auxiliaries and word order.
Word order |
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One of the consequences of the Norman invasion is that English vocabulary contains words of Germanic and words of French origin, the latter derived from Latin. As a result, English allows speakers to choose between Germanic and Latinate synonyms such as come or arrive, sight or vision, freedom or liberty, naval or marine. A computerized survey of about 80,000 words in the 3rd edition of the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary provided the following statistics on sources of English vocabulary (Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff 1973, cited in Wikipedia):
These English words came from the languages listed below. Can you tell which of these languages these words came from? Roll over the word to verify your answer.
Click here to learn more about borrowings into English. |
Arabic 
Writing
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English is written using the Latin alphabet. English spelling is largely historical, not phonological. The spelling of words often diverges considerably from their pronunciation, and English spelling is considered to be difficult for both native and non-native learners. In addition, American and British orthography has several notable differences, e.g., analyse (British) - analyze (American). Three centuries of Norman Conquest resulted in the English spelling being greatly influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, keeping their French spelling. In addition, English underwent some sound changes. For example, The Great Vowel Shift resulted in igh of night changing from a vowel followed by a velar fricative to a diphthong. The spelling of the word night, however, did not change. These changes introduced confusing inconsistencies, like the well-known example of the many pronunciations of ough (rough, through, though, plough). The introduction of the printing press institutionalized the existing spelling system, rather than providing an impetus for realigning it with pronunciation. By the time dictionaries were introduced in the mid 1600s, English orthography was institutionalized, and by the 1800s, most words had set spellings. Over the centuries, there have been numerous proposals for spelling reform, but they have mostly failed. |
Resources |
Resources for the study of English language |
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