English
English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now a global lingua franca. It is an official language of almost 60 sovereign states and the most commonly spoken language in sovereign states including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and a number of Caribbean nations. It is the third-most-common native language in the world, after Mandarin and Spanish.[ It is widely learned as a second language and is an official language of the European Union and of the United Nations, as well as of many world organisations.
English arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and what is now southeast Scotland. Following the extensive influence of England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom from the 17th to mid-20th centuries through the British Empire, it has been widely propagated around the world. Through the spread of English literature, world media networks such as the BBC, the American film and television industry, and the internet, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions.
Historically, English originated from the fusion of closely related dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by Germanic settlers (Anglo-Saxons) by the 5th century; the word English is simply the modern spelling of englisc, the name used by the Angles and Saxons for their language, after the Angles' ancestral region of Angeln (in what is now Schleswig-Holstein). The language was also influenced early on by the Old Norse language through Viking invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries.
The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman French: thus a layer of elaborate vocabulary, particularly in the field of governance, and some Romance-language spelling conventions were added to what had by then become Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the events that mark the emergence of Modern English.
In addition to native words inherited from the Germanic substrate of Old English, and those borrowed from Norman French, a significant number of English terms are derived from constructions based on roots originally taken from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life and remains the wellspring of much modern scientific and technical vocabulary.
Owing to the assimilation of words from many other languages throughout history, modern English contains a very large vocabulary, with complex and irregular spelling, particularly of vowels. Modern English has not only assimilated words from other European languages, but from all over the world. The Oxford English Dictionary lists more than 250,000 distinct words, not including many technical, scientific, and slang terms.
History
English originated in the dialects of North Sea Germanic that were carried to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what are now the Netherlands, northwest Germany, and Denmark. Up to that point, in Roman Britain the native population is assumed to have spoken Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, alongside the acrolectal influence of Latin, due to the 400-year period of Roman Britain. One of these incoming Germanic tribes was the Angles, whom Bede believed to have relocated entirely to Britain.The names 'England' (from Engla land "Land of the Angles") and English (Old English Englisc) are derived from the name of this tribe—but Saxons, Jutes and a range of Germanic peoples from the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland and Southern Sweden also moved to Britain in this era.
Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of Anglo-Saxon England but the West Saxon dialect eventually came to dominate, and it is in this that the poem Beowulf is written.
Old English was later transformed by two waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of the North Germanic language branch when Halfdan Ragnarsson and Ivar the Boneless started the conquering and colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries (see Danelaw). The second was by speakers of the Romance language Old Norman in the 11th century with the Norman conquest of England. Norman developed into Anglo-Norman, and then Anglo-French – and introduced a layer of words especially via the courts and government. As well as extending the lexicon with Scandinavian and Norman words, these two events simplified the grammar and transformed English into a borrowing language—unusually open to accepting new words from other languages.
The linguistic shifts in English following the Norman invasion produced what is now referred to as Middle English; Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is its best-known work. Throughout this period, Latin in some form was the lingua franca of European intellectual life – first the Medieval Latin of the Christian Church, and later the humanist Renaissance Latin – and those who wrote or copied texts in Latin commonly coined new terms from that language to refer to things or concepts for which there was no native English word.
Modern English, which includes the works of William Shakespeare[48] and the King James Version of the Bible, is generally dated from about 1550, and after the United Kingdom became a colonial power, English served as the lingua franca of the colonies of the British Empire. In the post-colonial period, some of the newly created nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the lingua franca to avoid the political difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. As a result of the growth of the British Empire, English was adopted in North America, India, Africa, Australia and many other regions – a trend that was reinforced by the emergence of the United States as a superpower in the mid-20th century. By the 21st century, it was more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.