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English Language)
The English language is a West Germanic language that originated in England. It is the third most common first language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca (diplomatic language) status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the United Kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries and the United States beginning in the 20th century. It is the most widely-learned language among those learning any second language.
History
English is descended from the language spoken by Germanic tribes that migrated to the land that would become known as England. These tribes are traditionally identified as the Frisians, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around the year 449, Vortigern, King of the British Isles, issued an invitation to the "Angle kin" (Angles, led by Hengest and Horsa) to help him against the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the South-East. Further aid was sought, and in response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes). The Chronicle documents the subsequent influx of "settlers" who eventually established seven kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. Modern scholarship considers most of this story to be legendary and politically motivated.
These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived largely in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by these invaders formed what would be called Old English which was a very similar language to modern Frisian which was also strongly influenced by yet another Germanic dialect, Old Norse, spoken by Norse who settled mainly in the North-East (see Jorvik). English, England, and East Anglia are derived from words referring to the Angles: Englisc, Angelcynn, and Englaland.
For the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Kings of England spoke only French, using it as the Court language. A large number of French words were assimilated into Old English, some words doubling with Saxon words (for instance ox and beef, sheep and mutton). The Old English also lost most of its inflections, resulting in Middle English. Around the year 1500, the Great Vowel Shift transformed Middle English to Modern English. The most famous surviving works from Old and Middle English are Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, respectively.
Modern English, the language described by this article, began its rise around the time of William Shakespeare.
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 undoubted living relatives of English are Scots and Frisian. Frisian is a language spoken by approximately half a million people in the Dutch province of Friesland (Fryslân), in nearby areas of Germany, and on a few islands in the North Sea.
After Scots and Frisian, the next closest relative is the modern Low Saxon language of the eastern Netherlands and northern Germany. Other less closely related living languages include Dutch, Afrikaans, German and the Scandinavian languages. Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (pronunciations are not always identical, of course), as English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from the Norman language after the Norman conquest and from French in further centuries; as a result, a substantial share of English vocabulary is quite close to the French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.), as well as occasional differences in meaning.
Geographic distribution
English is the primary language in Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados (Caribbean English), Bermuda, Dominica, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica (Jamaican English), New Zealand (New Zealand English), Antigua, St. Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom (British English) and the United States of America (American English).
English is also one of the primary languages of Belize (with Spanish), Canada (with French), India (with Hindi and 21 other state languages), Ireland (with Irish), Singapore (with Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and other Asian languages) and South Africa (along with Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and Northern Sotho).
In Hong Kong, English is an official language and is widely used in business activities. It is taught from kindergarten level, and is the medium of instruction for a few primary schools, many secondary schools and all universities. Substantial number of students acquire native-speaker level. It is so widely used and spoken that it is inadequate to say it is merely a second or foreign language.
Although English is not an official language of the United States federal government, it is for 27 of the 50 state governments (Hawaii also designated Hawaiian as an official language). It is an official language, but not native, in Cameroon, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Ghana, Gambia, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
English is the most widely used "second" and "learning" language in the world, and as such, many linguists believe, it is no longer the exclusive cultural emblem of "native English speakers," but rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it grows in use. Others theorise that there are limits to how far English can go in suiting everyone for communication purposes. It is the language most often studied as a foreign language in Europe (32.6 percent), followed by French, German and Spanish. It is also the most studied in Japan and in the People's Republic of China, where it is compulsory for most high school students.
Dialects and regional variants
The expansiveness of the British and the Americans has spread English throughout the globe. It is now the third-most spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. As such, it has bred a variety of English dialects and English-based creoles and pidgins.
The major varieties of English in most cases contain several sub-varieties, such as Cockney within British English, Newfoundland English within Canadian English, and African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics") within American English. English is considered a pluricentric language, with no variety being clearly considered the only standard.
Some people dispute the status of Scots as a closely-related separate language from English and consider it a group of English dialects. Scots has a long tradition as a separate written and spoken language. Pronunciation, grammar and lexis differ, sometimes substantially, from other Anglic varieties including Scottish English.
Due to English's wide use as a second language, English speakers can have many different accents, which may identify the speaker's native dialect or language. For more distinctive characteristics of regional accents, see Regional accents of English speakers. For more distinctive characteristics of regional dialects, see List of dialects of the English language.
Many countries around the world have blended English words and phrases into their everyday speech and refer to the result by a colloquial name that implies its bilingual origins, which parallels the English language's own addiction to loan words and borrowings. Named examples of these ad-hoc constructions, distinct from pidgin and creole languages, include Engrish, Wasei-eigo, Franglais and Spanglish. (See List of dialects of the English language for a complete list.) Europanto combines many languages but has an English core.
Constructed variants of English
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Basic English is simplified for easy international use. It is used by some aircraft manufacturers and other international businesses to write manuals and communicate. Some English schools in the Far East teach it as an initial practical subset of English.
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Special English is a simplified version of English used by the Voice of America. It uses a vocabulary of 1500 words.
-
English reform is an attempt to collectively improve upon the English language.
- Seaspeak and the related Airspeak and Policespeak , all based on restricted vocabularies, were designed by Edward Johnson in the 1980s to aid international cooperation and communication in specific areas.
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European English is a new variant of the English language created to become the common language in Europe
Sounds
Vowels
Notes:
It is the vowels that differ most from region to region.
Where symbols appear in pairs, the first corresponds to the sounds used in North American English, the second corresponds to English spoken elsewhere.
- North American English lacks this sound; words with this sound are pronounced with /ɑ/ or /ɔ/.
- Many dialects of North American English don't have this vowel. See cot-caught merger.
- The North American variation of this sound is a rhotic vowel.
- Many speakers of North American English don't distinguish between these two unstressed vowels. For them, roses and Rosa's are pronounced the same, and the symbol usually used is schwa /ə/.
- This sound is often transcribed with /i/ or with /ɪ/.
Consonants
This is English's Consonantal System (including dialect sounds) using IPA symbols.
- The velar nasal [ŋ] is a non-phonemic allophone of /n/ in some northerly British accents, appearing only before /g/. In all other dialects it is a separate phoneme, although it only occurs in syllable codas.
- The alveolar flap [ɾ] is an allophone of /t/ and /d/ in unstressed syllables in North American English and increasingly in Australian English. This is the sound of "tt" or "dd" in the words latter and ladder, which are homophones in North American English. This is the same sound represented by single "r" in some varieties of Spanish.
- In some dialects, such as Cockney, the interdentals /θ/ and /ð/ are usually merged with /f/ and /v/, and in others, like African-American Vernacular English, /ð/ is merged with /d/. In some Irish varieties, /θ/ and /ð/ become the corresponding dental plosives, which then contrast with the usual alveolar plosives.
- The voiceless velar fricative /x/ is used only by Scottish or Welsh speakers of English for Scots/Gaelic words such as loch /lɒx/ or by some speakers for loanwords from German and Hebrew like Reich /raɪx/ or Chanukah /xanuka/, or in some dialects such as Scouse (Liverpool) where the affricate [kx] is used instead of /k/ in words such as docker /dɒkxə/. In most speakers, the sounds [k] and [h] are used instead.
- Voiceless w [ʍ] is found in Scottish, upper-class British, some eastern United States, and New Zealand accents. In all other dialects it is merged with /w/.
Basic sound-letter correspondence
| IPA |
Alphabetic representation |
Dialect-specific |
|
p
|
p |
|
|
b
|
b |
|
|
t
|
t, th (rarely) |
th thing (New York, African-American) |
|
d
|
d |
th that (New York, African-American) |
|
ɾ
|
-- |
intervocalic d, t latter, ladder (American English, also see flapping) |
|
k
|
c (+ a, o, u, consonants), k, ck, ch, kh (in foreign words) |
|
|
g
|
g, gh |
|
|
ʔ
|
' Hawai'i (in words of foreign origin) |
t butter (Cockney), eight (Estuary English) |
|
m
|
m |
|
|
n
|
n |
|
|
ɲ
|
n, ñ (only in words of foreign origin) |
ny, ni (various, only when followed by a vowel) |
|
|
ŋ
|
n (before g or k) |
|
|
f
|
f, ph, gh (final, infrequent) laugh, rough |
th thing (Cockney, Estuary English) |
|
v
|
v |
th with (Cockney, Estuary English) |
|
θ
|
th |
|
|
ð
|
th |
|
|
s
|
s, c (+ e, i, y) |
|
|
z
|
z, s (finally or occasionally medially), word-initial x xylophone |
|
|
ʃ
|
sh, sch, ti portion, ci suspicion; si/ssi tension, mission; ch (esp. in words of French origin); rarely su sugar |
su insure (American English) |
|
ʒ
|
si division, zh (in foreign words), z azure, su pleasure, g (in words of French origin) |
|
|
x
|
kh, ch, h (in foreign words) |
occasionally ch loch (Scottish English, Welsh English) |
|
h
|
h (initially, otherwise silent) |
|
|
ch |
occasionally tu future, culture (American English) |
|
j, g (+ e, i), dg badge |
|
|
ɹ
|
r |
|
|
j
|
y (initially or surrounded by vowels) |
|
|
l
|
l |
|
|
ɫ
|
l milk (this sound occurs in most English dialects) |
|
|
w
|
w, wh |
l milk (Pittsburgh English, Cockney) |
|
ʍ
|
-- |
wh (various) |
See also
International Phonetic Alphabet for English
Grammar
English grammar is based on its Germanic roots, though some scholars during the 1700s and 1800s attempted to impose Latin grammar upon it, with little success. English is only a slightly inflected language, much less than most Indo-European languages. It compensates for this by placing more grammatical information in auxiliary words and word order, through retaining features like:
- Possessive (sometimes called the saxon genitive, but which has developed into a clitic)
- He is Alfredo's best friend. -'s
- 3rd person singular present
- present participle/ progressive
- past participle
- The car was stolen. -en
- Alfredo has talked to the police. -ed
- gerund
- Working is good for the soul. -ing
- plural
- All your sigs are mine. -s
- comparative
- Alfredo is smarter than Ricky. -er
- superlative
- Alfredo has the bluest eyes. -est
It must be noted that, unlike other Germanic languages or the Romance languages, English nouns do not take gender and verbs can take the "ing" ending. However, despite this relative straightforwardness, as any native speaker (or those attempting to master it) knows, English has its own set of maddening idiosyncrasies. See American and British English differences. See also English plural.
Vocabulary
Almost without exception, Germanic words (which include all the basics such as pronouns and conjunctions) are shorter, and more informal. Latinate words are often regarded as more elegant or educated. However, the excessive use of Latinate words is often a sign of either pretentiousness (as in the stereotypical policeman's talk of "apprehending the suspect") or obfuscation (as in a military document which says "neutralize" when it means "kill"). George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language gives a thorough treatment of this feature of English.
An English-speaker is often able to choose between Germanic and Latinate synonyms: "come" or "arrive"; "sight" or "vision"; "freedom" or "liberty". The richness of the language is that such synonyms have slightly different meanings, enabling the language to be used in a very flexible way to express fine variations or shades of thought. List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents
In everyday speech the majority of words will normally be Germanic. If one wishes to make a forceful point in an argument in a very blunt way, Germanic words will invariably be chosen. A majority of Latinate words (or at least a majority of content words) will normally be used in more formal speech and writing, such as a courtroom or an encyclopedia article.
English is noted for the vast size of its active vocabulary and its fluidity. English easily accepts technical terms into common usage and imports new words which often come into common usage. In addition, slang provides new meanings for old words. In fact this fluidity is so pronounced that a distinction often needs to be made between formal forms of English and contemporary usage. See also sociolinguistics.
Number of Words in English
As the General Explanations at the beginning of the Oxford English Dictionary state:
- The Vocabulary of a widely-diffused and highly-cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits.... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference.
The vocabulary of English is undoubtedly vast, but assigning a specific number to its size is more a matter of definition than of calculation. Unlike other languages, there is no Academy to define officially-accepted words. Neologisms are coined regularly in medicine and technology and science; some enter wide usage, others remain restricted to small circles. Foreign words used in immigrant communities often make their way into wider English usage. Archaic, dialectal, and regional words might be considered 'English' or not.
The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) includes over 500,000 headwords, following a rather inclusive policy:
- It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang. (Supplement to the OED, 1933).
Word origins
One of the consequences of the French influence is that the vocabulary of English is, to a certain extent, divided between those words which are Germanic (mostly Old English), and those which are "Latinate" (Latin-derived, mostly from Norman French but some borrowed directly from Latin).
A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973) which estimated the origin of English words as follows:
-
French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
- Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
- Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
- Greek: 5.32%
- No etymology given: 4.03%
- Derived from proper names: 3.28%
- All other languages contributed less than 1%
James D. Nicoll made the oft-quoted observation: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." [1]
Writing system
English is written using the Latin alphabet. The spelling system or orthography of English is historical, not phonological. The spelling of words often diverges considerably from how they are spoken, and English spelling is often considered to be one of the most difficult to learn of any language that uses an alphabet. See English orthography.
Written accents
English includes some words which can be written with accent marks. These words have mostly been imported from other languages, usually French. But it is increasingly rare for writers of English to actually use the accent marks for common words, even in very formal writing, to the point where actually writing the accent may be interpreted as a sign of pretension – though this view is counterbalanced by the view that fine typography should preserve accents, especially where it makes a distinction in pronunciation (cf. façade vs facade which would rhyme with cascade). The strongest tendency to retain the accent is in words that are atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign. For example, café has a pronounced final e, which would be silent by the normal English pronunciation rules.
Some examples: à la carte, ångström, appliqué, attaché, blasé, bric-à-brac, café, cliché, crème, crêpe, derrière, éclair, façade, fiancé(e), flambé, führer, maté, ménage à trois, naïve, né(e), papier-mâché, passé, piñata, piñón, protégé, raison d'être, résumé, risqué, sauté, séance, über-, vis-à-vis, voilà.
Some words such as rôle and hôtel were first seen with accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accent is almost never used. The words were considered very French borrowings when first used in English, even accused by some of being foreign phrases used where English alternatives would suffice, but today their French origin is largely forgotten. The accent on "élite" has disappeared most of the time by today, but Time Magazine still uses it.
It is also possible to use a diaeresis to indicate a syllable break, but again this is often left out or a hyphen used instead. Examples: coöperate (or co-operate), daïs, naïve, noël, reëlect (or re-elect).
Written accents are also used occasionally in poetry and scripts for dramatic performances to indicate that a certain normally unstressed syllable in a word should be stressed for dramatic effect, or to keep with the meter of the poetry. This use is frequently seen in archaic and pseudoarchaic writings with the -ed suffix, to indicate that the "e" should be fully pronounced: i.e. cursèd.
In certain older texts (typically in British English), the use of ligatures is common in words such as archæology, œsophagus, and encyclopædia. Such words have Latin or Greek origin.
See also
Dialects
Pronunciation
Social
Grammar
Usage
External links
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English-English dictionary - combines information from several dictionaries
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Cambridge Dictionary
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Varieties of English and the OED
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Learning English abroad and online. With dictionaries, games, penpals, etc.
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AskOxford.com: Global English
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BBC - Radio 4 - Routes of English
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BBC - Learning English
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English Grammar Online free exercises, explanations, games and teaching materials on English as a foreign language
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Learning English Online grammar, vocabulary, exercises, exams - information for learners of English as a foreign language
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Pako's English Page - Articles and advice on learning English
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Ethnologue report for English
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All free English dictionaries
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Freelang - French-English Dictionary made by Bertrand Cornu
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Read Print Books - includes many public domain works in classic English literature
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teach-yourself-english.com Free online English course
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Development of English
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Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun Four online, interactive games to help students learn vocabulary words. Hangman, Word Search, Match Game, The Vocabulary Quiz
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The World's Most Widely Spoken Languages
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Online English Grammar Lessons Exercises, games, fun stuff, quizes, kids and teacher resources all free.
Further Reading
- A History of the English Language by Albert Baugh and T. Cable (London, 2002)
- The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, by David Crystal
- The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur
