English language

The **English language** is a Germanic language of the Indo-European language family and also the original video language of *Language Apocalypse*.

It was originally spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated from Anglia, a peninsula on the Baltic Sea (not to be confused with East Anglia), to the area of Great Britain later named after them: England. The closest living relatives of English include Scots, followed by the Low Saxon and Frisian languages. English is genealogically a West Germanic language, though its vocabulary is also hugely influenced by Old Norman French and Latin, as well as by Old Norse (a North Germanic language).

English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th centuries, are collectively called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England; this was a period in which English absorbed abundant French and Latin vocabulary through Old French: in particular, its Old Norman dialect. Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London, the printing of the King James Bible and the start of the Great Vowel Shift.

Modern English has been spreading around the world since the 17th century by the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States. Through all types of printed and electronic media of these countries, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the *lingua franca* in many regions and professional contexts such as science, navigation and law. Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent-marking pattern, with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, and a fairly fixed subject–verb–object word order. Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation.

English is the most spoken language in the world (if Chinese is divided into variants) and the third-most spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish. It is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers. As of 2005, it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English. English is the majority native language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (see Anglosphere) and the Republic of Ireland, an official language and the main language of Singapore, and it is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania. It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union and many other world and regional international organisations. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch. English speakers are called "Anglophones". There is much variability among the many accents and dialects of English used in different countries and regions in terms of phonetics and phonology, and sometimes also vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and spelling, but it does not typically prevent understanding by speakers of other dialects and accents, although mutual unintelligibility can occur at extreme ends of the dialect continuum.

## Classification

English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, whose languages gradually evolved into the Anglic languages in the British Isles, and into the Frisian languages and Low German/Low Saxon on the continent. The Frisian languages, which together with the Anglic languages form the Anglo-Frisian languages, are the closest living relatives of English. Low German/Low Saxon is also closely related, and sometimes English, the Frisian languages, and Low German are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic) languages, though this grouping remains debated. Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern English. Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other Anglic languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy (Yola) dialects of Ireland.

Like Icelandic and Faroese, the development of English in the British Isles isolated it from the continental Germanic languages and influences, and it has since diverged considerably. English is not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic language, differing in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, although some of these, such as Dutch or Frisian, do show strong affinities with English, especially with its earlier stages.

Unlike Icelandic and Faroese, which were isolated, the development of English was influenced by a long series of invasions of the British Isles by other peoples and languages, particularly Old Norse and Norman French. These left a profound mark of their own on the language, so that English shows some similarities in vocabulary and grammar with many languages outside its linguistic clades—but it is not mutually intelligible with any of those languages either. Some scholars have argued that English can be considered a mixed language or a creole—a theory called the Middle English creole hypothesis. Although the great influence of these languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed language.

English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German, and Swedish. These shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor called Proto-Germanic. Some shared features of Germanic languages include the division of verbs into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs, and the sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants, known as Grimm's and Verner's laws. English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic (see Phonological history of Old English § Palatalization).

## History

English was born from the Ingvaeonic branch of the West Germanic languages.

The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c. year 550–1066). Old English developed from a set of West Germanic dialects, often grouped as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic, and originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony and southern Jutland by Germanic peoples known to the historical record as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as the Roman economy and administration collapsed. By the 7th century, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in Britain, replacing the languages of Roman Britain (43–409): Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, and Latin, brought to Britain by the Roman occupation. *England* and *English* (originally *Ænglaland* and *Ænglisc*) are named after the Angles.

Old English was divided into four dialects: the Anglian dialects (Mercian and Northumbrian) and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the 9th century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety. The epic poem *Beowulf* is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, *Cædmon's Hymn*, is written in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the early period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the 6th century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms. It included the runic letters *wynn* ⟨*ƿ*⟩ and *thorn* ⟨*þ*⟩, and the modified Latin letters *eth* ⟨*ð*⟩, and *ash* ⟨*æ*⟩.

Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German, and its closest relative is Old Frisian. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns (*he*, *him*, *his*) and has a few verb inflections (*speak*, *speaks*, *speaking*, *spoke*, *spoken*), but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings.

The translation of Matthew 8:20 from 1000 shows examples of case endings (nominative plural, accusative plural, genitive singular) and a verb ending (present plural):

* *Foxas habbað holu and heofonan fuglas nest*
* Fox-as habb-að hol-u and heofon-an fugl-as nest-∅
* fox-nom.pl have-prs.pl hole-acc.pl and heaven-gen.sg bird-nom.pl nest-acc.pl
* "Foxes have holes and the birds of heaven nests"

### Middle English

Main articles: Middle English and Influence of French on English

From the 8th to the 12th century, Old English gradually transformed through language contact into Middle English. Middle English is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, but it developed further in the period from 1200 to 1450.

First, the waves of Norse colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English into intense contact with Old Norse, a North Germanic language. Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in the Danelaw area around York, which was the centre of Norse colonisation; today these features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English. However the centre of norsified English seems to have been in the Midlands around Lindsey, and after 920 CE when Lindsey was reincorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity, Norse features spread from there into English varieties that had not been in direct contact with Norse speakers. An element of Norse influence that persists in all English varieties today is the group of pronouns beginning with *th-* (*they, them, their*) which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with *h-* (*hie, him, hera*).

With the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the now norsified Old English language was subject to contact with Old French, in particular with the Old Norman dialect. The Norman language in England eventually developed into Anglo-Norman. Because Norman was spoken primarily by the elites and nobles, while the lower classes continued speaking Anglo-Saxon (English), the main influence of Norman was the introduction of a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains. Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar. The distinction between nominative and accusative cases was lost except in personal pronouns, the instrumental case was dropped, and the use of the genitive case was limited to indicating possession. The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms, and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible. In the Wycliffe Bible of the 1380s, the verse Matthew 8:20 was written: *Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heuene han nestis* Here the plural suffix *-n* on the verb *have* is still retained, but none of the case endings on the nouns are present. By the 12th century Middle English was fully developed, integrating both Norse and French features; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early Modern English around 1500. Middle English literature includes Geoffrey Chaucer's *The Canterbury Tales*, and Malory's *Le Morte d'Arthur*. In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.

### Early Modern English

Main article: Early Modern English
Graphic representation of the Great Vowel Shift, showing how the pronunciation of the long vowels gradually shifted, with the high vowels i: and u: breaking into diphthongs and the lower vowels each shifting their pronunciation up one level
The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English (1500–1700). Early Modern English was characterised by the Great Vowel Shift (1350–1700), inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation.

The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English. It was a chain shift, meaning that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. Mid and open vowels were raised, and close vowels were broken into diphthongs. For example, the word *bite* was originally pronounced as the word *beet* is today, and the second vowel in the word *about* was pronounced as the word *boot* is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages.

English began to rise in prestige, relative to Norman French, during the reign of Henry V. Around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents, and a new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard, developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands. In 1476, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England and began publishing the first printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English. Literature from the Early Modern period includes the works of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I. Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the consonant clusters /kn ɡn sw/ in *knight*, *gnat*, and *sword* were still pronounced. Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic represent the distinct characteristics of Early Modern English.

In the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, written in Early Modern English, Matthew 8:20 says, "The Foxes haue holes and the birds of the ayre haue nests." This exemplifies the loss of case and its effects on sentence structure (replacement with subject–verb–object word order, and the use of *of* instead of the non-possessive genitive), and the introduction of loanwords from French (*ayre*) and word replacements (*bird* originally meaning "nestling" had replaced OE *fugol*).

### Spread of Modern English

By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. England continued to form new colonies, and these later developed their own norms for speech and writing. English was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly independent nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. In the 20th century the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC and other broadcasters, caused the language to spread across the planet much faster. In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.

As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published, and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his *A Dictionary of the English Language*, which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms. In 1828, Noah Webster published the *American Dictionary of the English language* to try to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.

In modern English, the loss of grammatical case is almost complete (it is now only found in pronouns, such as *he* and *him*, *she* and *her*, *who* and *whom*), and SVO word order is mostly fixed. Some changes, such as the use of do-support, have become universalised. (Earlier English did not use the word "do" as a general auxiliary as Modern English does; at first it was only used in question constructions, and even then was not obligatory. Now, do-support with the verb *have* is becoming increasingly standardised.) The use of progressive forms in *-ing*, appears to be spreading to new constructions, and forms such as *had been being built* are becoming more common. Regularisation of irregular forms also slowly continues (e.g. *dreamed* instead of *dreamt*), and analytical alternatives to inflectional forms are becoming more common (e.g. *more polite* instead of *politer*). British English is also undergoing change under the influence of American English, fuelled by the strong presence of American English in the media and the prestige associated with the US as a world power.

## Grographical Distribution

English is an official language spoken by the United Kingdom, and a founding member language of the Google Translate Language Alliance.

As of 2016, 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is the largest language by number of speakers. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans.

The countries where English is spoken can be grouped into different categories according to how English is used in each country. The "inner circle" countries with many native speakers of English share an international standard of written English and jointly influence speech norms for English around the world. English does not belong to just one country, and it does not belong solely to descendants of English settlers. English is an official language of countries populated by few descendants of native speakers of English. It has also become by far the most important language of international communication when people who share no native language meet anywhere in the world.

## Orthography

English has the original ISO Basic 26 Latin letters in it's alphabet, all of which are members of the International Alphabet.

The alphabet is shown here:

Since the ninth century, English has been written in a Latin alphabet (also called Roman alphabet). Earlier Old English texts in Anglo-Saxon runes are only short inscriptions. The great majority of literary works in Old English that survive to today are written in the Roman alphabet. The modern English alphabet contains 26 letters of the Latin script: 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 (which also have capital forms: 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).

The spelling system, or orthography, of English is multi-layered and complex, with elements of French, Latin, and Greek spelling on top of the native Germanic system. Further complications have arisen through sound changes with which the orthography has not kept pace. Compared to European languages for which official organisations have promoted spelling reforms, English has spelling that is a less consistent indicator of pronunciation, and standard spellings of words that are more difficult to guess from knowing how a word is pronounced. There are also systematic spelling differences between British and American English. These situations have prompted proposals for spelling reform in English.

Although letters and speech sounds do not have a one-to-one correspondence in standard English spelling, spelling rules that take into account syllable structure, phonetic changes in derived words, and word accent are reliable for most English words. Moreover, standard English spelling shows etymological relationships between related words that would be obscured by a closer correspondence between pronunciation and spelling, for example the words *photograph*, *photography*, and *photographic*, or the words *electricity* and *electrical*. While few scholars agree with Chomsky and Halle (1968) that conventional English orthography is "near-optimal", there is a rationale for current English spelling patterns. The standard orthography of English is the most widely used writing system in the world. Standard English spelling is based on a graphomorphemic segmentation of words into written clues of what meaningful units make up each word.

Readers of English can generally rely on the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation to be fairly regular for letters or digraphs used to spell consonant sounds. The letters *b*, *d*, *f*, *h*, *j*, *k*, *l*, *m*, *n*, *p*, *r*, *s*, *t*, *v*, *w*, *y*, *z* represent, respectively, the phonemes /b, d, f, h, dʒ, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, j, z/. The letters *c* and *g* normally represent /k/ and /ɡ/, but there is also a soft *c* pronounced /s/, and a soft *g* pronounced /dʒ/. The differences in the pronunciations of the letters *c* and *g* are often signalled by the following letters in standard English spelling. Digraphs used to represent phonemes and phoneme sequences include *ch* for /tʃ/, *sh* for /ʃ/, *th* for /θ/ or /ð/, *ng* for /ŋ/, *qu* for /kw/, and *ph* for /f/ in Greek-derived words. The single letter *x* is generally pronounced as /z/ in word-initial position and as /ks/ otherwise. There are exceptions to these generalisations, often the result of loanwords being spelled according to the spelling patterns of their languages of origin or residues of proposals by scholars in the early period of Modern English to follow the spelling patterns of Latin for English words of Germanic origin.

For the vowel sounds of the English language, however, correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are more irregular. There are many more vowel phonemes in English than there are single vowel letters (*a*, *e*, *i*, *o*, *u*, *w*, *y*). As a result, some "long vowels" are often indicated by combinations of letters (like the *oa* in *boat*, the *ow* in *how*, and the *ay* in *stay*), or the historically based silent *e* (as in *note* and *cake*).

The consequence of this complex orthographic history is that learning to read and write can be challenging in English. It can take longer for school pupils to become independently fluent readers of English than of many other languages, including Italian, Spanish, and German. Nonetheless, there is an advantage for learners of English reading in learning the specific sound-symbol regularities that occur in the standard English spellings of commonly used words. Such instruction greatly reduces the risk of children experiencing reading difficulties in English. Making primary school teachers more aware of the primacy of morpheme representation in English may help learners learn more efficiently to read and write English.

English writing also includes a system of punctuation marks that is similar to those used in most alphabetic languages around the world. The purpose of punctuation is to mark meaningful grammatical relationships in sentences to aid readers in understanding a text and to indicate features important for reading a text aloud.

## Phonology

The phonetics and phonology of the English language differ from one dialect to another, usually without interfering with mutual communication. Phonological variation affects the inventory of phonemes (i.e. speech sounds that distinguish meaning), and phonetic variation consists in differences in pronunciation of the phonemes.  This overview mainly describes the standard pronunciations of the United Kingdom and the United States: Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA). (See § Dialects, accents, and varieties, below.)

The phonetic symbols used below are from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

### Consonants

Most English dialects share the same 24 consonant phonemes. The consonant inventory shown below is valid for California English, and for RP.

In the table, when obstruents (stops, affricates, and fricatives) appear in pairs, such as /p b/, /tʃ dʒ/, and /s z/, the first is fortis (strong) and the second is lenis (weak). Fortis obstruents, such as /p tʃ s/ are pronounced with more muscular tension and breath force than lenis consonants, such as /b dʒ z/, and are always voiceless. Lenis consonants are partly voiced at the beginning and end of utterances, and fully voiced between vowels. Fortis stops such as /p/ have additional articulatory or acoustic features in most dialects: they are aspirated [pʰ] when they occur alone at the beginning of a stressed syllable, often unaspirated in other cases, and often unreleased [p̚] or pre-glottalised [ʔp] at the end of a syllable. In a single-syllable word, a vowel before a fortis stop is shortened: thus *nip* has a noticeably shorter vowel (phonetically, but not phonemically) than *nib* [nɪˑb̥] (see below).

* lenis stops: *bin* [b̥ɪˑn], *about* [əˈbaʊt], *nib* [nɪˑb̥]
* fortis stops: *pin* [pʰɪn]; *spin* [spɪn]; *happy* [ˈhæpi]; *nip* [nɪp̚] or [nɪʔp]

In RP, the lateral approximant /l/, has two main allophones (pronunciation variants): the clear or plain [l], as in *light*, and the dark or velarised [ɫ], as in *full*. GA has dark *l* in most cases.

* clear *l*: RP *light* [laɪt]
* dark *l*: RP and GA *full* [fʊɫ], GA *light* [ɫaɪt]

All sonorants (liquids /l, r/ and nasals /m, n, ŋ/) devoice when following a voiceless obstruent, and they are syllabic when following a consonant at the end of a word.

* voiceless sonorants: *clay* [kl̥eɪ̯]; *snow* RP [sn̥əʊ̯], GA [sn̥oʊ̯]
* syllabic sonorants: *paddle* [ˈpad.l̩], *button* [ˈbʌt.n̩]

### Vowels

The pronunciation of vowels varies a great deal between dialects and is one of the most detectable aspects of a speaker's accent. The table below lists the vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA), with examples of words in which they occur from lexical sets compiled by linguists. The vowels are represented with symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet; those given for RP are standard in British dictionaries and other publications.

In RP, vowel length is phonemic; long vowels are marked with a triangular colon ⟨ː⟩ in the table above, such as the vowel of *need* [niːd] as opposed to *bid* [bɪd]. In GA, vowel length is non-distinctive.

In both RP and GA, vowels are phonetically shortened before fortis consonants in the same syllable, like /t tʃ f/, but not before lenis consonants like /d dʒ v/ or in open syllables: thus, the vowels of *rich* [rɪtʃ], *neat* [nit], and *safe* [seɪ̯f] are noticeably shorter than the vowels of *ridge* [rɪˑdʒ], *need* [niˑd], and *save* [seˑɪ̯v], and the vowel of *light* [laɪ̯t] is shorter than that of *lie* [laˑɪ̯]. Because lenis consonants are frequently voiceless at the end of a syllable, vowel length is an important cue as to whether the following consonant is lenis or fortis.

The vowel /ə/ only occurs in unstressed syllables and is more open in quality in stem-final positions. Some dialects do not contrast /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unstressed positions, so that *rabbit* and *abbot* rhyme and *Lenin* and *Lennon* are homophonous, a dialect feature called weak vowel merger. GA /ɜr/ and /ər/ are realised as an *r*-coloured vowel [ɚ], as in *further* [ˈfɚðɚ] (phonemically /ˈfɜrðər/), which in RP is realised as [ˈfəːðə] (phonemically /ˈfɜːðə/).

### Phonotactics

An English syllable includes a syllable nucleus consisting of a vowel sound. Syllable onset and coda (start and end) are optional. A syllable can start with up to three consonant sounds, as in *sprint* /sprɪnt/, and end with up to four, as in *texts* /teksts/. This gives an English syllable the following structure, (CCC)V(CCCC) where C represents a consonant and V a vowel; the word *strengths* /strɛŋkθs/ is thus an example of the most complex syllable possible in English. The consonants that may appear together in onsets or codas are restricted, as is the order in which they may appear. Onsets can only have four types of consonant clusters: a stop and approximant, as in *play*; a voiceless fricative and approximant, as in *fly* or *sly*; *s* and a voiceless stop, as in *stay*; and *s*, a voiceless stop, and an approximant, as in *string*. Clusters of nasal and stop are only allowed in codas. Clusters of obstruents always agree in voicing, and clusters of sibilants and of plosives with the same point of articulation are prohibited. Furthermore, several consonants have limited distributions: /h/ can only occur in syllable-initial position, and /ŋ/ only in syllable-final position.

## Example Text

> All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
>
> The Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written in the English language.

## Trivia

* C is pronounced /s/ before i, e, and y.
* U is sometimes pronounced /w/
* English is one of the two original languages who are Germanic, the other one is German.