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English language
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: English language |
| US History Encyclopedia: English Language |
The English language has its origins in about the fifth century A.D., when tribes from the continent, the Jutes, the Saxons, and then the larger tribe of Angles invaded the small island we now call England (from Angle-land). Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, is preserved in Beowulf (c. A.D. 800). Middle English developed following the Norman invasion of 1066, exemplified in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1400). Modern English, dating from the sixteenth century, is exemplified in the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). From the time the Pilgrims landed in America (1620), the language began to take its own course in this "New World." Expressions like "fixing to," which had never been used in England, were "cropping up" (an expression going back to Middle English) in the colonial press by 1716.
So the American Revolution (1775–1783) not only created a new nation but also divided the English language into what H. L. Mencken, author of the classic study The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, called "two streams." These streams diverged to produce different words with the same denotation (the American "trunk" of a car is a "boot" in England), different pronunciations for the same words (the American sked-ju-el is the British shed-ju-el), and different spellings (theater vs. theatre, labor vs. labour).
By 1781, the word "Americanism" had been coined by John Witherspoon, a Scottish clergyman recruited to become president of Princeton University. These Americanisms, Witherspoon wrote, were not "worse in themselves, but merely …of American and not of English growth." The separation of the "two streams of English" was already noticeable. In his usual acerbic manner, Mencken applauded the American resistance to rules: "Standard [British] English must always strike an American as a bit stilted and precious" (p. 774).
Judgment by Language: the Shibboleth
Once there is any kind of "standard," people could begin passing judgment (that's spelled "judgement" in England) based on what was deemed "correct." One of the first recorded instances is the "shibboleth" test in the Old Testament. Hebrew, like all other languages, had many dialects, and the twelve tribes of Israel did not always pronounce words in the same way. Thus, when the Gileadites "seized the fords of the Jordan" (Judg. 12:5–6), it was not enough to merely ask those who wished to cross the river "Are you an Ephraimite?" They needed a test to distinguish the enemy. They used pronunciation, and those who said "sib-bo-leth" instead of "shib-bo-leth" were slain.
Americans are by and large more tolerant of language differences than the English. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the Englishman who wrote Pygmalion (on which the musical My Fair Lady was based), wrote, "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Shaw was, like Mencken, a great debunker and exploder of pretension. "An honest and natural slum dialect," he wrote, "is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically un-taught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club" (Mencken, p. 775).
Dialects: the Branches of the Stream
Shaw's comment raises a point worth highlighting: we all speak a dialect. If English, in Mencken's phrase, divides into "two streams," British and American, there are within those streams many creeks and branches (two Americanisms according to Witherspoon). Both Cockney and "the Queen's English" are, after all, dialects of British English, although one carries more prestige.
Likewise, we have many dialects in the United States. Mark Twain, in his prefatory note to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells us that there are at least seventeen distinguishable dialects in the novel. In the early twenty-first century we find many dialects of American English as we move from the New York Bronx to Charleston, or from the Midwestern plains to the San Fernando Valley (home of the "valley girls"), or from Chicago to New Orleans (is that pronounced with the stress on the first or the second syllable: ore-leans or ore-lens?) Is there such a thing today as a "standard" American language?
Guides to Correctness
Certainly there have been those willing to provide guidance to the public on "correct" usage of the language. America's most famous lexicographer, Noah Webster, published his "Blue-backed" American Speller soon after the Revolution, teaching not only spelling but also pronunciation, common sense, morals, and good citizenship. His first dictionary (1806) was one of several (the first in English being Samuel Johnson's in 1755), but when Webster died in 1843, the purchase of rights to his dictionary by Charles and George Merriam led to a new, one-volume edition that sold for six dollars in 1847. This edition became the standard. Except for the Bible, Webster's spelling book and dictionary were the best-selling publications in American history up to the mid-twentieth century.
Webster's spelling book (often marketed with the Bible) molded four generations of American schoolchildren, proclaiming what was "right" without apology. In contrast, The American Heritage Dictionary of the late twentieth century offers guidance based on a survey of its "Usage Panel," a group of respected writers and speakers who are asked what they find acceptable. In the third college edition (1997), the editors note drastic changes in the Panel's attitudes. More and more of the old shibboleths are widely accepted. For example, in 1969 most of the Usage Panel objected to using the words "contact" and "intrigue" as verbs, but by the 1993 survey, most had no problem with either (though "hopefully" and "disinterested" remained problematic for most). Language, if it is spoken, lives and changes (in contrast to a "dead language" such as Latin, which does not evolve because it is not spoken). As with a river, so with language: you never put your tongue to the same one twice.
Lexicographers now present their dictionaries as a description of how the language looks at a particular time rather than as a prescription of what is "correct." The constant evolution of language makes new editions necessary. Many people have come to use the word "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" instead of "without bias"; therefore, despite objections of purists, it does in fact mean that. "Corruption" or change?
Likewise with pronunciation. In the 1990s, the word "harass" came into frequent use in the news. Americans had traditionally put the stress on the second syllable: he-RASS. This pronunciation, according to The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide (1999), "first occurred in American English and has gained wide acceptance over the last 50 years." But reporters on television during the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, in which he was accused of "sexual harassment" by Anita Hill, tended to prefer the pronunciation HAR-ess, "the older, more traditional pronunciation [which] is still preferred by those for whom British pronunciation is a guide." There are many influences on our shifting language habits.
Simplification Movement
Pragmatic Americans have often sought to simplify the language. The Simplified Spelling Board, created in 1906, sought to simplify the spelling of words like "though." "But tho their filosofy was that simpler is better, they cood not get thru to peepl as they wisht." The Chicago Tribune began to simplify spelling in their publication in 1935, but the American public would not send their brides down the "aile" nor transport their loved ones' caskets in a "herse," so the attempt was largely abandoned with a few exceptions, such as "tho," "thru," and "catalog." Spelling, after all, has often been used as a test of intelligence and education. It also reflects the history of the language. The word "knight" carries with it the echoes of Chaucer's Middle English pronunciation: ka-nick-te.
Another major impediment to spelling reform is the association of phonetic spelling with illiteracy: while the reformers may "ake" to "berry" those men and "wimmen" who "apose" them, those who write of the "kat's tung" open themselves to ridicule. Mencken declared, however, that "American spelling is plainly better than English spelling, and in the long run it seems sure to prevail" (p. 483).
Growing Vocabulary
One distinctive aspect of the English language is its tendency to absorb foreign words. English-speaking peoples (many of them explorers and adventurers) have adopted and adapted terms from many languages. Loanwords come from many foreign languages, sometimes directly, sometimes through other languages: dirge (Latin), history (Greek), whiskey (Celtic), fellow (Scandinavian), sergeant (French), chocolate (Spanish), umbrella (Italian), tattoo (German), sugar (Arabic), kowtow (Chinese), banana (African), moccasin (Native American).
Table 1
| Trends in New Word Formation, 1900–2000 | ||
| Category producing | ||
| Decade | the most new words | Example |
| 1900–1910 | cars | accelerator |
| 10s | war | flame-thrower (from the German Flammenwerfer) |
| 20s | clothes | bathing beauty, threads (slang for clothes) |
| 30s | war | decrypt, fifth column, flak |
| 40s | war | ground zero, radar |
| 50s | media | teleconference, Xerox |
| 60s | computer | interface, cursor |
| 70s | computer | hard disk, microprocessor |
| 80s | media | cyberspace, dish (TV antenna), shock jock |
| 90s | politics | Generation X, off-message |
Sometimes new words have to be created. In a survey of new words in the twentieth century, John Ayto found an interesting correlation between neologisms and the events and inventions of the times. Consider the list shown in Table 1.
Promoting and Resisting One "standard"
One of the great forces for molding a common American English since the mid-twentieth century has been the media, especially television. During the first decades of television news coverage, reporters and anchors were expected to have or to adopt a Midwestern accent, the least distinctive and most generally understandable, the most "American" as it were. This tended to promote a common "American" accent. As the century grew to a close, however, ethnic groups grew in size and multiculturalism became a potent force in society. More dialects (and more ethnicity in general) began to show up on the screen. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush emphasized his ability to speak Spanish.
This increasing power of groups who spoke English as a second language or not at all led to a widespread call for "English only" laws in the 1980s and 1990s, though the movement never achieved critical mass. On the other end of the political spectrum were those who argued that teachers should use the vernacular of the pupils in order to help them learn. Great arguments swirled around the terms "Ebonics" and "bilingual education."
The International Language
English has replaced French as the international language for many reasons: the political, military, and economic dominance of the United States since World War II (1939–1945), of course, but also the influence of American culture, especially movies, television, and rock music. We were well on our way to this position before Pearl Harbor drew us into war in 1941. Mencken attributes this partly to the "dispersion of the English-speaking peoples," but in typical Mencken style goes on to say that those peoples "have been, on the whole, poor linguists, and so they have dragged their language with them, and forced it upon the human race." Robert MacNeil, in the fascinating study of the English language for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), The Story of English (1986), observed that when landing in Rome, an Italian pilot flying an Italian airliner converses with the control tower in English.
The Digital Word
Just as the printing press, widely used throughout Europe by 1500, changed our use of words, leading to new written forms such as the novel and the newspaper, so the computer has created change. E-mail, chat rooms, and Web pages have made words on the screen almost as common as on the printed page. We already see changes taking place, as onscreen language becomes more informal (often creating new words, such as "online"). Words get shortened: electronic mail becomes e-mail, which in turn becomes email. Note, however, that this is not new. "Today" was spelled "to-day" in the early twentieth century.
We many need help "navigating the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era," according to Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age (version 1.0, 1996, with 2.0 published in 1999). The online experience has spawned various means of conveying tone including acronyms (such as LOL for "laughing out loud" and IRL for "in real life" —as distinguished from the virtual world of cyberspace) and emoticons such as >: D for "demonic laughter" and >: P for "sticking tongue out at you." English continues to change with influences of all kinds.
Finding Guidance Amid the Flux
The two streams continue to evolve, of course, and the purists like William Safire and John Simon continue to preach against the "corruption" of the language. But like the river, the English language will flow whither it will. Two of the most respected guides in the midst of this flux are both in third editions.
The Elements of Style, praised as the best of its kind by professional writers for over four decades, is E. B. White's revision of his professor's book. William Strunk's "little book" (1918) so impressed White as a college freshman that decades later he revised Strunk's original (which can be found on the Internet) into this thin volume in praise of conciseness and precision in writing. It has never been out of print since 1959 when the first edition was published, is still in print and praised as the best of its kind by professional writers.
The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996) shows tolerance for expressions that Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) would have never allowed in his first edition in 1926. The third edition, unlike the first two, lists as one of three meanings for "fix": the "American expression 'to be fixing to,' meaning 'to prepare to, intend, be on the point of.'" This guide, one of the most esteemed in print, labels it "informal" and notes that it is "hardly ever encountered outside the US." American English continues to evolve and standards continue to change.
Bibliography
Ayto, John. Twentieth-Century Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Burchfield, R. W., ed. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Widely respected guide to "correct" usage.
Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. 4thed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Classic work on semantics.
Hale, Constance, and Jessie Scanlon. Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Wired magazine is an influential publication about computer technology.
Mencken, H. L. The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. Raven I. McDavid, Jr., ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Classic readable and influential examination of the new stream.
McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Viking, 1986. This book is a companion to the excellent PBS television series available on videotape.
Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Pyles, Thomas, and John Algeo. The Origins and Development of the English Language. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
Strunk, William Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
—William E. King
| Columbia Encyclopedia: English language |
English language, member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Spoken by about 470 million people throughout the world, English is the official language of about 45 nations. It is the mother tongue of about 60 million persons in the British Isles, from where it spread to many other parts of the world owing to British exploring, colonizing, and empire-building from the 17th through 19th cent. It is now also the first language of an additional 228 million people in the United States; 16.5 million in Canada; 17 million in Australia; 3 million in New Zealand and a number of Pacific islands; and approximately 15 million others in different parts of the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Asia. As a result of such expansion, English is the most widely scattered of the great speech communities. It is also the most commonly used auxiliary language in the world. The United Nations uses English not only as one of its official languages but also as one of its two working languages.
The changes are more radical than they appear, for Modern English ō and ā are diphthongs. The words home, stones, and name exemplify the fate of unaccented vowels, which became ə, then ə disappeared. In Old English important inflectional contrasts depended upon the difference between unaccented vowels; so, as these vowels coalesced into ə and this disappeared, much of the case system disappeared too. In Modern English a different technique, word order (subject + predicate + object), is used to show what a case contrast once did, namely, which is the actor and which the goal of the action.
There are many dialect areas; in England and S Scotland these are of long standing, and the variations are striking; the Scottish dialect especially has been cultivated literarily. There are newer dialect differences also, such as in the United States, including regional varieties such as Southern English, and cultural varieties, such as Black English. Standard forms of English differ also; thus, the standard British ("the king's English") is dissimilar to the several standard varieties of American and to Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Indian English.
History of English
Today's English is the continuation of the language of the 5th-century Germanic invaders of Britain. No records exist of preinvasion forms of the language. The language most closely related to English is the West Germanic language Frisian. The history of English is an aspect of the history of the English people and their development. Thus in the 9th cent. the standard English was the dialect of dominant Wessex (see Anglo-Saxon literature). The Norman Conquest (11th cent.) brought in foreign rulers, whose native language was Norman French; and English was eclipsed by French as the official language. When English became again (14th cent.) the language of the upper class, the capital was London, and the new standard (continued in Modern Standard English) was a London dialect.
It is convenient to divide English into periods-Old English (or Anglo-Saxon; to c.1150), Middle English (to c.1500; see Middle English literature), and Modern English; this division implies no discontinuity, for even the hegemony of French affected only a small percentage of the population. The English-speaking areas have expanded at all periods. Before the Normans the language was spoken in England and S Scotland, but not in Cornwall, Wales, or, at first, in Strathclyde. English has not completely ousted the Celtic languages from the British Isles, but it has spread vastly overseas.
A Changed and Changing Language
Like other languages, English has changed greatly, albeit imperceptibly, so that an English speaker of 1300 would not have understood the English of 500 nor the English of today. Changes of every sort have taken place concomitantly in the sounds (phonetics), in their distribution (phonemics), and in the grammar (morphology and syntax). The following familiar words show changes of 1,000 years:
Although the pronunciation of English has changed greatly since the 15th cent., the spelling of English words has altered very little over the same period. As a result, English spelling is not a reliable guide to the pronunciation of the language.
The vocabulary of English has naturally expanded, but many common modern words are derived from the lexicon of the earliest English; e.g., bread, good, and shower. From words acquired with Latin Christianity come priest, bishop, and others; and from words adopted from Scandinavian settlers come root, egg, take, window, and many more. French words, such as castle, began to come into English shortly before the Norman Conquest. After the Conquest, Norman French became the language of the court and of official life, and it remained so until the end of the 14th cent.
During these 300 or more years English remained the language of the common people, but an increasingly large number of French words found their way into the language, so that when the 14th-century vernacular revival, dominated by Chaucer and Wyclif, restored English to its old place as the speech of all classes, the French element in the English vocabulary was very considerable. To this phase of French influence belong most legal terms (such as judge, jury, tort, and assault) and words denoting social ranks and institutions (such as duke, baron, peer, countess, and parliament), together with a great number of other words that cannot be classified readily-e.g., honor, courage, season, manner, study, feeble, and poor. Since nearly all of these French words are ultimately derived from Late Latin, they may be regarded as an indirect influence of the classical languages upon the English vocabulary.
The direct influence of the classical languages began with the Renaissance and has continued ever since; even today Latin and Greek roots are the chief source for English words in science and technology (e.g., conifer, cyclotron, intravenous, isotope, polymeric, and telephone). During the last 300 years the borrowing of words from foreign languages has continued unchecked, so that now most of the languages of the world are represented to some extent in the vocabulary. English vocabulary has also been greatly expanded by the blending of existing words (e.g., smog from smoke and fog) and by back-formations (e.g., burgle from burglar), whereby a segment of an existing word is treated as an affix and dropped, resulting in a new word, usually with a related meaning.
Bibliography
See H. L. Mencken, The American Language (rev. 4th ed. 1963); G. W. Turner, The English Language in Australia and New Zealand (1966);M. Pei, The Story of the English Language (new ed. 1968); P. Roberts, Modern Grammar (1968); M. M. Orkin, Speaking Canadian English (1971); T. Pyles and J. Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language (3d ed. 1982); W. F. Bolton, A Living Language (1982); B. Kachru, ed., The Other Tongue (1982); R. Hudson, Invitation to Linguistics (1984); J. Baugh, Black Street Speech (1985); The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (2d ed. 1987).
| Blogs: Related blogs on: English |
- Alea... Acess the ladder to English Advancement Student's writing and useful information for learning English
- Wordmall English language examined
| Wikipedia: English language |
| English | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation | /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1] | |
| Spoken in | (see below) | |
| Total speakers | First language: 309–400 million Second language: 199–1,400 million[2][3] Overall: 500 million–1.8 billion[4][3] |
|
| Ranking | 3 (native speakers)[5] Total: 3 [6] |
|
| Language family | Indo-European
|
|
| Writing system | Latin (English variant) | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | 53 countries United Nations European Union Commonwealth of Nations CoE NATO NAFTA OAS OIC PIF UKUSA |
|
| Regulated by | No official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | en | |
| ISO 639-2 | eng | |
| ISO 639-3 | eng | |
 |
||
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
English is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,[7][8][9][10] it has become the lingua franca in many parts of the world.[11][12] It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language in Commonwealth countries and many international organisations.
Historically, English originated from several dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers beginning in the 5th century. English was further influenced by the Old Norse language of Viking invaders.
At the time of the Norman conquest, Old English developed into Middle English, borrowing heavily from the Norman (Anglo-French) vocabulary and spelling conventions. The etymology of the word "English" is a derivation from the 12th century Old English englisc or Engle, plural form Angles ("of, relating to, or characteristic of England").[13]
Modern English developed with the Great Vowel Shift that began in 15th-century England, and continues to adopt foreign words from a variety of languages, as well as coining new words. A significant number of English words, especially technical words, have been constructed based on roots from Latin and ancient Greek.
Contents |
Significance
See also: English-speaking world and Anglosphere
Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca,[14][15] is the dominant language or in some instances even the required international language of communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy.[16] Its spread beyond the British Isles began with the growth of the British Empire, and by the late nineteenth century its reach was truly global.[17] Following the British colonisation of North America, it became the dominant language in the United States and in Canada. The growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a global superpower since World War II have significantly accelerated the language's spread across the planet.[15]
A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of fields, occupations and professions such as medicine and computing; as a consequence over a billion people speak English to at least a basic level (see English language learning and teaching). It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.
Linguists such as David Crystal recognise that one impact of this massive growth of English, in common with other global languages, has been to reduce native linguistic diversity in many parts of the world, most particularly in Australasia and North America, and its huge influence continues to play an important role in language attrition.[18] Similarly, historical linguists, aware of the complex and fluid dynamics of language change, are always aware of the potential English contains through the vast size and spread of the communities that use it and its natural internal variety, such as in its creoles and pidgins, to produce a new family of distinct languages over time.[19]
History
Main article: History of the English language
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Lower Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands in the 5th century. One of these Germanic tribes was the Angles,[20] who may have come from Angeln, and Bede wrote that their whole nation came to Britain,[21] leaving their former land empty. The names 'England' (from Engla land "Land of the Angles") and English (Old English Englisc) are derived from the name of this tribe.
The Anglo-Saxons began invading around 449 AD from the regions of Denmark and Jutland.[22][23] Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England the native population spoke Brythonic, a Celtic language.[24] Although the most significant changes in dialect occurred after the Norman invasion of 1066, the language retained its name and the pre-Norman invasion dialect is now known as Old English.[25]
Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Great Britain.[26] One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. One of the most prevalent forces in the evolution of the English language was the Roman Catholic Church. Beginning with the Rule of St Benedict in 530 and continuing until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536, the Roman Catholic Church instructed monasteries and Catholic officials like Augustine of Canterbury to preserve intellectual culture within their schools, scriptoria, and libraries.
During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had a monopoly on intellectual property in British society, which they used to exert great influence on the English language.[citation needed] Catholic monks mainly wrote or copied text in Latin, the prevalent Medieval lingua franca of Europe.[27] When monks occasionally wrote in the vernacular, it was common to substitute or derive English-like words from Latin to describe or refer to things in which there was no English word. Extensive vocabulary, a derivative of Latin vocabularium, in the English language largely comprises Latin word derivatives. It is believed that the intellectual elite in British society over the years perpetuated vocabulary that Catholic monks contributed to English; furthermore, they continued the custom of deriving new words from Latin long after the waning of Catholic Church.[citation needed]
Old English vernacular was also influenced by two waves of invasion. The first was by language speakers of the North Germanic branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonised parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. (Over the centuries, this lost the specifically Norman element under the influence of Parisian French and, later, of English, eventually turning into a distinctive dialect of Anglo-French.) These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language in the strict linguistic sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a lexical supplementation of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and a huge vocabulary.
With the emergence and spread of the British Empire, the English language was adopted in North America, India, Africa, Australia and other regions. The emergence of the United States as a superpower has also helped the spread of English.
The English language belongs to the Anglo-Frisian sub-group of the West Germanic branch of the [[Germanic languages|Germanic Family], a member of the Indo-European languages. The closest living relatives of English are the Scots language, spoken primarily in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland, and Frisian. As Scots is viewed by some linguists to be a group of English dialects rather than a separate language, Frisian is often considered to be the closest living relative.
After Scots and Frisian come those Germanic languages which are more distantly related, namely the non-Anglo-Frisian West Germanic languages (Low German, Dutch, Afrikaans, High German), and the North Germanic languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese). With the exception of Scots, and on an extremely basic level, Frisian, none of the other languages is mutually intelligible with English, due in part to the divergences in lexis, syntax, semantics, and phonology, and to the isolation afforded to the English language by the British Isles, although some such as Dutch do show strong affinities with English. This isolation has allowed English and Scots to develop independently of the Continental Germanic languages and their influences over time. [28]
Lexical differences with the other Germanic languages can arise from several causes, such as natural semantic drift caused by isolation, and heavy usage in English of words taken from Latin (for example, "exit", vs. Dutch uitgang) (literally "out-gang" with "gang" as in "gangway") and French "change" vs. German Änderung, "movement" vs. German Bewegung (literally "othering" and "be-way-ing" ("proceeding along the way")). Preference of one synonym over another can also cause a differentiation in lexis, even where both words are Germanic (for instance, both English care and German Sorge descend from Proto-Germanic *karo and *surgo respectively, but *karo became the dominant word in English for "care" while in German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages, the *surgo root prevailed. *Surgo still survives in English as sorrow).
Although the syntax of German is significantly different from that of English and other Germanic languages, with different rules for setting up sentences (for example, German Ich habe noch nie etwas auf dem Platz gesehen, vs. English "I have still never seen anything in the square"), English syntax remains extremely similar to that of the North Germanic languages, which are believed to have influenced English syntax during the Middle English Period (eg., Norwegian Jeg har likevel aldri sett noe i torget; Swedish Jag har ännu aldrig sett något på torget). It is for this reason that despite a lack of mutual intelligibility, English-speakers and Scandinavians can learn each others' languages relatively easily, although, as English is a far more important language, most such language mastery is one-way (i.e., Scandinavians learning English).
Dutch syntax is intermediate between English and German (eg. Ik heb nog nooit iets gezien op het plein). In spite of this difference, there are more similarities between English and other Germanic languages than differences (eg. English bring/brought/brought, Dutch brengen/bracht/gebracht, Norwegian bringe/brakte/brakt; English eat/ate/eaten, Dutch eten/at/gegeten, Norwegian ete/åt/ett), with the most similarities occurring between English and the languages of the Low Countries (Dutch and Low German) and Scandinavia.
Semantic differences cause a number of false friends between English and its relatives (eg. English time "time" vs Norwegian time "hour"), and differences in Phonology can obscure words which actually are genetically related ("enough" vs. German genug, Danish nok). Sometimes both semantics and phonology are different (German Zeit, "time", is related to English "tide", but the English word, through a transitional phase of meaning "period"/"interval", has come to mean gravitational effects on the ocean by the moon, the original meaning preserved only in combined forms like Yuletide and betide).[citation needed] These differences, though minor, preclude mutual intelligibility, yet English is still infinitely closer to other Germanic languages than to languages of any other family.
Finally, English has been forming compound words and affixing existing words separately from the other Germanic languages for over 1500 years and has different habits in that regard. For instance, abstract nouns in English may be formed from native words by the suffixes "‑hood", "-ship", "-dom" and "-ness". All of these have cognate suffixes in most or all other Germanic languages, but their usage patterns have diverged, as German "Freiheit" vs. English "freedom" (the suffix "-heit" being cognate of English "-hood", while English "-dom" is cognate with German "-tum"). Icelandic and Faroese are other Germanic languages which follow English in this respect, since, like English, they developed independent of German influences.
Many written French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (though pronunciations are often quite different) because English absorbed a large vocabulary from Norman and French, via Anglo-Norman after the Norman Conquest and directly from French in subsequent centuries. As a result, a large portion of English vocabulary is derived from French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.), as well as occasional divergences in meaning of so-called false friends.
The pronunciation of most French loanwords in English (with exceptions such as mirage or phrases like coup d’état) has become completely anglicised and follows a typically English pattern of stress.[citation needed] Some North Germanic words also entered English because of the Danish invasion shortly before then (see Danelaw); these include words such as "sky", "window", "egg", and even "they" (and its forms) and "are" (the present plural form of "to be").[citation needed]
Geographical distribution
Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language.[29] English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.[30][31] However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world, though possibly second to a combination of the Chinese languages (depending on whether or not distinctions in the latter are classified as "languages" or "dialects").[6][32]
Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to over a billion depending on how literacy or mastery is defined and measured.[33][34] Linguistics professor David Crystal calculates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.[35]
The countries with the highest populations of native English speakers are, in descending order: United States (215 million),[36] United Kingdom (61 million),[37] Canada (18.2 million),[38] Australia (15.5 million),[39], Ireland (3.8 million),[37], South Africa (3.7 million),[40] and New Zealand (3.6 million) 2006 Census [41]. No figure is given for the number of South African native speakers, but it would be somewhere between the number of people who spoke English only (3,008,058) and the total number of English speakers (3,673,623), if one ignores the 197,187 people who did not provide a usable answer.
Countries such as the Philippines, Jamaica and Nigeria also have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. Of those nations where English is spoken as a second language, India has the most such speakers ('Indian English'). Crystal claims that, combining native and non-native speakers, India now has more people who speak or understand English than any other country in the world.[42][43]
Countries in order of total speakers
| Rank | Country | Total | Percent of population | First language | As an additional language | Population | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 251,388,301 | 96% | 215,423,557 | 35,964,744 | 262,375,152 | Source: US Census 2000: Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000, Table 1. Figure for second language speakers are respondents who reported they do not speak English at home but know it "very well" or "well". Note: figures are for population age 5 and older |
| 2 | India | 90,000,000 | 8% | 178,598 | 65,000,000 second language speakers. 25,000,000 third language speakers |
1,028,737,436 | Figures include both those who speak English as a second language and those who speak it as a third language. 1991 figures.[44][45] The figures include English speakers, but not English users.[46] |
| 3 | Nigeria | 79,000,000 | 53% | 4,000,000 | >75,000,000 | 148,000,000 | Figures are for speakers of Nigerian Pidgin, an English-based pidgin or creole. Ihemere gives a range of roughly 3 to 5 million native speakers; the midpoint of the range is used in the table. Ihemere, Kelechukwu Uchechukwu. 2006. "A Basic Description and Analytic Treatment of Noun Clauses in Nigerian Pidgin." Nordic Journal of African Studies 15(3): 296–313. |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 59,600,000 | 98% | 58,100,000 | 1,500,000 | 60,000,000 | Source: Crystal (2005), p. 109. |
| 5 | Philippines | 48,800,000 | 52%[47] | 3,427,000[47] | 45,373,000 | 92,000,000 | Total speakers: Census 2000, text above Figure 7. 63.71% of the 66.7 million people aged 5 years or more could speak English. Native speakers: Census 1995, as quoted by Andrew Gonzalez in The Language Planning Situation in the Philippines, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 19 (5&6), 487–525. (1998). Ethnologue lists 3.4 million native speakers with 52% of the population speaking it as a additional language.[47] |
| 6 | Canada | 25,246,220 | 85% | 17,694,830 | 7,551,390 | 29,639,030 | Source: 2001 Census – Knowledge of Official Languages and Mother Tongue. The native speakers figure comprises 122,660 people with both French and English as a mother tongue, plus 17,572,170 people with English and not French as a mother tongue. |
| 7 | Australia | 18,172,989 | 92% | 15,581,329 | 2,591,660 | 19,855,288 | Source: 2006 Census.[48] The figure shown in the first language English speakers column is actually the number of Australian residents who speak only English at home. The additional language column shows the number of other residents who claim to speak English "well" or "very well". Another 5% of residents did not state their home language or English proficiency. |
| Note: Total = First language + Other language; Percentage = Total / Population | |||||||
Countries where English is a major language
English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize (Belizean Kriol), Bermuda, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guernsey (Channel Island English), Guyana, Ireland (Hiberno-English), The Isle of Man (Manx English), Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat]], Nauru, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the United States.
In some countries where English is not the most spoken language, it is an official language; these countries include Botswana, Cameroon, Dominica, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines (Philippine English), Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
It is also one of the 11 official languages that are given equal status in South Africa (South African English). English is also the official language in current dependent territories of Australia (Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and Cocos Island) and of the United States (Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico),[49] the former British colony of Hong Kong, and Netherlands Antilles. (See List of countries where English is an official language for more details.)
English is not an official language in either the United States or the United Kingdom.[50][51] Although the United States federal government has no official languages, English has been given official status by 30 of the 50 state governments.[52] Although falling short of official status, English is also an important language in several former colonies and protectorates of the United Kingdom, such as Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Malaysia]], and the United Arab Emirates. English is not a de jure official language of Israel; however, the country has maintained official language use[clarification needed] a de facto role for English since the British mandate.[53]
English as a global language
Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "world language", the lingua franca of the modern era.[15] While English is not an official language in most countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a second language around the world. Some linguists (such as David Graddol) believe that it is no longer the exclusive cultural property of "native English speakers", but is rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it continues to grow.[15] It is, by international treaty, the official language for aerial and maritime communications.[54] English is an official language of the United Nations and many other international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee.
English is the language most often studied as a foreign language in the European Union (by 89% of schoolchildren), followed by French (32%), German (18%), Spanish (8%), and Russian; while the perception of the usefulness of foreign languages amongst Europeans is 68% English, 25% French, 22% German, and 16% Spanish.[55] Among non-English speaking EU countries, a large percentage of the population claimed to have been able to converse in English in the Netherlands (87%), Sweden (85%), Denmark (83%), Luxembourg (66%), Finland (60%), Slovenia (56%), Austria (53%), Belgium (52%), and Germany (51%).[56] Norway and Iceland also have a large majority of competent English-speakers.[citation needed]
Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around the world. English is also the most commonly used language in the sciences.[15] In 1997, the Science Citation Index reported that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries.
Dialects and regional varieties
Main article: List of dialects of the English language
The expansion of the British Empire and—since World War II—the influence of the United States have spread English throughout the globe.[15] Because of that global spread, English has developed a host of English dialects and English-based creole languages and pidgins.
Two educated native dialects of English have wide acceptance as standards in much of the world—one based on educated southern British and the other based on educated Midwestern American. The former is sometimes called BBC (or the Queen's) English, and it may be noticeable by its preference for "Received Pronunciation"; it typifies the Cambridge model, which is the standard for the teaching of English to speakers of other languages in Europe, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and other areas influenced either by the British Commonwealth or by a desire not to be identified with the United States.
The latter dialect, General American, which is spread over most of the United States and much of Canada, is more typically the model for the American continents and areas (such as the Philippines) which have had either close association with the United States or desire to be so identified. Aside from those two major dialects are numerous other varieties of English, which include, in most cases, several subvarieties, such as Cockney, Scouse and Geordie within British English; Newfoundland English within Canadian English; and African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics") and Southern American English within American English. English is a pluricentric language, without a central language authority like France's Académie française; and therefore no one variety is considered "correct" or "incorrect" except in terms of the expectations of the particular audience to which the language is directed.
Scots has its origins in early Northern Middle English[57] and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, but following the Acts of Union 1707 a process of language attrition began, whereby successive generations adopted more and more features from Standard English, causing dialectalisation. Whether it is now a separate language or a dialect of English better described as Scottish English is in dispute, although the UK government now accepts Scots as a regional language and has recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.[58] There are a number of regional dialects of Scots, and pronunciation, grammar and lexis of the traditional forms differ, sometimes substantially, from other varieties of English.
English speakers have many different accents, which often signal the speaker's native dialect or language. For the more distinctive characteristics of regional accents, see Regional accents of English, and for the more distinctive characteristics of regional dialects, see List of dialects of the English language. Within England, variation is now largely confined to pronunciation rather than grammar or vocabulary. At the time of the Survey of English Dialects, grammar and vocabulary differed across the country, but a process of lexical attrition has led most of this variation to die out.[59]
Just as English itself has borrowed words from many different languages over its history, English loanwords now appear in many languages around the world, indicative of the technological and cultural influence of its speakers. Several pidgins and creole languages have been formed on an English base, such as Jamaican Patois, Nigerian Pidgin, and Tok Pisin. There are many words in English coined to describe forms of particular non-English languages that contain a very high proportion of English words.
Constructed varieties of English
- Basic English is simplified for easy international use. Manufacturers and other international businesses tend to write manuals and communicate in Basic English. Some English schools in Asia teach it as a practical subset of English for use by beginners.
- E-Prime excludes forms of the verb to be.
- English reform is an attempt to improve collectively upon the English language.
- Manually Coded English – a variety of systems have been developed to represent the English language with hand signals, designed primarily for use in deaf education. These should not be confused with true sign languages such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language used in Anglophone countries, which are independent and not based on English.
- 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. There is also a tunnelspeak for use in the Channel Tunnel.
- Special English is a simplified version of English used by the Voice of America. It uses a vocabulary of only 1500 words.
Phonology
Main article: English phonology
Vowels
See also: IPA chart for English dialects
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It is the vowels that differ most from region to region. Length is not distinctive in most varieties of North American English.
| IPA | Description | word |
|---|---|---|
| monophthongs | ||
| iː | Close front unrounded vowel | bead |
| ɪ | Near-close near-front unrounded vowel | bid |
| ɛ | Open-mid front unrounded vowel | bed[vn 1] |
| æ | Near-open front unrounded vowel | bad[vn 2] |
| ɒ | Open back rounded vowel | box[vn 3] |
| ɔː | Open-mid back rounded vowel | pawed[vn 4] |
| ɑː | Open back unrounded vowel | bra |
| ʊ | Near-close near-back vowel | good |
| uː | Close back rounded vowel | booed[vn 5] |
| ʌ | Open-mid back unrounded vowel, near-open central vowel[vn 6] | bud. |
| ɜr | Open-mid central unrounded vowel | bird[vn 7] |
| ə | Schwa | Rosa's[vn 8] |
| ɨ | Close central unrounded vowel | roses[vn 8][vn 9] |
| diphthongs | ||
| eɪ | Close-mid front unrounded vowel- Close front unrounded vowel |
bayed[vn 10] |
| oʊ | Close-mid back rounded vowel- Near-close near-back vowel |
bode[vn 11][vn 10] |
| aɪ | Open front unrounded vowel Near-close near-front unrounded vowel |
cry[vn 12] |
| aʊ | Open front unrounded vowel Near-close near-back vowel |
cow[vn 13] |
| ɔɪ | Open-mid back rounded vowel Close front unrounded vowel |
boy |
| ʊər | Near-close near-back vowel Schwa |
boor[vn 14] |
| ɛər | Open-mid front unrounded vowel Schwa |
fair[vn 15] |
Notes
- ^ In RP, this is closer to [e]
- ^ In younger speakers of RP, this is closer to [a]
- ^ Many American English dialects lack this sound; in such dialects, words with this sound elsewhere are pronounced with /ɑː/ or /ɔː/. See Lot-cloth split.
- ^ Some dialects of North American English do not have this vowel. See Cot-caught merger.
- ^ The letter <U> can represent either /uː/ or the iotated vowel /juː/. In BRP, if this iotated vowel /juː/ occurs after /t/, /d/, /s/ or /z/, it often triggers palatalisation of the preceding consonant, turning it to [t͡ɕ], [d͡ʑ], [ɕ] and [ʑ] respectively, as in tune, during, sugar, and azure. In American English, palatalisation does not generally happen unless the /juː/ is followed by r, with the result that /(t, d, s, z)juːr/ turn to [tʃər], [dʒər], [ʃər] and [ʒər] respectively, as in nature, verdure, sure, and treasure.
- ^ The back-vowel symbol ʌ is conventional for this English central vowel. It is actually generally closer to a [ɐ] In the northern half of England, this vowel is not used and ʊ is used in its place.
- ^ The North American variation of this sound is a rhotic vowel [ɝ], the RP version a long central vowel [ɜː].
- ^ a b Many speakers of North American English do not 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 /ə/ or with /ɪ/.
- ^ a b The diphthongs /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ are monophthongal [eː] and [oː] in many dialects, including General American, Scottish, Irish and Northern English.
- ^ In RP and parts of North America, this is closer to [əʊ]. As a reduced vowel, it may become [ɵ] ([ɵʊ] before another vowel) or [ə], depending on accent.
- ^ In parts of North America (especially in Canada) /aɪ/ is pronounced [ʌɪ] before voiceless consonants, so that writer and rider and distinguished by their vowels, [ˈɹʌɪɾɚ, ˈɹaɪɾɚ], rather than their consonants.
- ^ In Canada, this is pronounced [ʌʊ] before a voiceless consonant.
- ^ In many accents, this sound is coming to be pronounced [ɔː(r)] rather than [ʊə(r)]. See English-language vowel changes before historic r.
- ^ In some non-rhotic accents, the schwa offglide of /ɛə/ may be dropped, monophthising and lengthening the sound to [ɛː].
Consonants
This is the English consonantal system using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
| Bilabial | Labio- dental |
Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Labial- velar |
Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ[cn 1] | ||||||
| Plosive | p b | t d | k ɡ | ||||||
| Affricate | tʃ dʒ[cn 2] | ||||||||
| Fricative | f v | θ ð[cn 3] | s z | ʃ ʒ[cn 2] | ç[cn 4] | x[cn 5] | h | ||
| Flap | ɾ[cn 6] | ||||||||
| Approximant | ɹ[cn 2] | j | ʍ w[cn 7] | ||||||
| Lateral | l |
Notes
- ^ The velar nasal [ŋ] is a non-phonemic allophone of /n/ in some northerly British accents, appearing only before /k/ and /ɡ/. In all other dialects it is a separate phoneme, although it only occurs in syllable codas.
- ^ a b c The sounds /ʃ/, /ʒ/, and /ɹ/ are labialised in some dialects. Labialisation is never contrastive in initial position and therefore is sometimes not transcribed. Most speakers of General American realise <r> (always rhoticised) as the retroflex approximant /ɻ/, whereas the same is realised in Scottish English, etc. as the alveolar trill.
- ^ In some dialects, such as Cockney, the interdentals /θ/ and /ð/ have usually merged with /f/ and /v/, and in others, like African American Vernacular English, /ð/ has merged with dental /d/. In some Irish varieties, /θ/ and /ð/ become dental plosives, which then contrast with the usual alveolar plosives.
- ^ The voiceless palatal fricative /ç/ is in most accents just an allophone of /h/ before /j/; for instance human /çjuːmən/. However, in some accents (see this), the /j/ has dropped, but the initial consonant is the same.
- ^ The voiceless velar fricative /x/ is used 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 Bach /bax/ or Chanukah /xanuka/. /x/ is also used in South African English. In some dialects such as Scouse (Liverpool) either [x] or the affricate [kx] may be used as an allophone of /k/ in words such as docker [dɒkxə]. Most native speakers have a great deal of trouble pronouncing it correctly when learning a foreign language. Most speakers use the sounds [k] and [h] instead.
- ^ The alveolar tap [ɾ] is an allophone of /t/ and /d/ in unstressed syllables in North American English and Australian English.[60] This is the sound of tt or dd in the words latter and ladder, which are homophones for many speakers of North American English. In some accents such as Scottish English and Indian English it replaces /ɹ/. This is the same sound represented by single r in most varieties of Spanish.
- ^ Voiceless w [ʍ] is found in Scottish and Irish English, as well as in some varieties of American, New Zealand, and English English. In most other dialects it is merged with /w/, in some dialects of Scots it is merged with /f/.
Voicing and aspiration
Voicing and aspiration of stop consonants in English depend on dialect and context, but a few general rules can be given:
- Voiceless plosives and affricates (/p/, /t/, /k/, and /tʃ/) are aspirated when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable – compare pin [pʰɪn] and spin [spɪn], crap [kʰɹ̥æp] and scrap [skɹæp].
- In some dialects, aspiration extends to unstressed syllables as well.
- In other dialects, such as Indian English, all voiceless stops remain unaspirated.
- Word-initial voiced plosives may be devoiced in some dialects.
- Word-terminal voiceless plosives may be unreleased or accompanied by a glottal stop in some dialects; examples: tap [tʰæp̚], sack [sæk̚].
- Word-terminal voiced plosives may be devoiced in some dialects (e.g. some varieties of American English) – examples: sad [sæd̥], bag [bæɡ̊]. In other dialects, they are fully voiced in final position, but only partially voiced in initial position.
Supra-segmental features
Tone groups
English is an intonation language. This means that the pitch of the voice is used syntactically; for example, to convey surprise or irony, or to change a statement into a question.
In English, intonation patterns are on groups of words, which are called tone groups, tone units, intonation groups, or sense groups. Tone groups are said on a single breath and, as a consequence, are of limited length, more often being on average five words long or lasting roughly two seconds. For example:
- /duː juː ˈniːd ˈɛnɪθɪŋ/ Do you need anything?
- /aɪ ˈdoʊnt | ˈnoʊ/ I don't, no
- /aɪ doʊnt ˈnoʊ/ I don't know (contracted to, for example, [ˈaɪ doʊnoʊ] or [ˈaɪdənoʊ] I dunno in fast or colloquial speech that de-emphasises the pause between 'don't' and 'know' even further)
Characteristics of intonation
English is a strongly stressed language, in that certain syllables, both within words and within phrases, get a relative prominence/loudness during pronunciation while the others do not. The former kind of syllables are said to be accentuated/stressed and the latter are unaccentuated/unstressed.
Hence in a sentence, each tone group can be subdivided into syllables, which can either be stressed (strong) or unstressed (weak). The stressed syllable is called the nuclear syllable. For example:
- That | was | the | best | thing | you | could | have | done!
Here, all syllables are unstressed, except the syllables/words best and done, which are stressed. Best is stressed harder and, therefore, is the nuclear syllable.
The nuclear syllable carries the main point the speaker wishes to make. For example:
- John had not stolen that money. (... Someone else had.)
- John had not stolen that money. (... Someone said he had. or... Not at that time, but later he did.)
- John had not stolen that money. (... He acquired the money by some other means.)
- John had not stolen that money. (... He had stolen some other money.)
- John had not stolen that money. (... He had stolen something else.)
Also
- I did not tell her that. (... Someone else told her)
- I did not tell her that. (... You said I did. or... but now I will)
- I did not tell her that. (... I did not say it; she could have inferred it, etc)
- I did not tell her that. (... I told someone else)
- I did not tell her that. (... I told her something else)
This can also be used to express emotion:
- Oh, really? (...I did not know that)
- Oh, really? (...I disbelieve you. or... That is blatantly obvious)
The nuclear syllable is spoken more loudly than the others and has a characteristic change of pitch. The changes of pitch most commonly encountered in English are the rising pitch and the falling pitch, although the fall-rising pitch and/or the rise-falling pitch are sometimes used. In this opposition between falling and rising pitch, which plays a larger role in English than in most other languages, falling pitch conveys certainty and rising pitch uncertainty. This can have a crucial impact on meaning, specifically in relation to polarity, the positive–negative opposition; thus, falling pitch means, "polarity known", while rising pitch means "polarity unknown". This underlies the rising pitch of yes/no questions. For example:
- When do you want to be paid?
- Now? (Rising pitch. In this case, it denotes a question: "Can I be paid now?" or "Do you desire to pay now?")
- Now. (Falling pitch. In this case, it denotes a statement: "I choose to be paid now.")
Grammar
Main article: English grammar
English grammar has minimal inflection compared with most other Indo-European languages. For example, Modern English, unlike Modern German or Dutch and the Romance languages, lacks grammatical gender and adjectival agreement. Case marking has almost disappeared from the language and mainly survives in pronouns. The patterning of strong (e.g. speak/spoke/spoken) versus weak verbs inherited from its Germanic origins has declined in importance in modern English, and the remnants of inflection (such as plural marking) have become more regular.
At the same time, the language has become more analytic, and has developed features such as modal verbs and word order as resources for conveying meaning. Auxiliary verbs mark constructions such as questions, negative polarity, the passive voice and progressive aspect.
Vocabulary
The English vocabulary has changed considerably over the centuries.[61]
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Look up Appendix:List of Proto-Indo-European roots in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Like many languages deriving from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), many of the most common words in English can trace back their origin (through the Germanic branch) to PIE. Such words include the basic pronouns I, from Old English ic, (cf. German Ich, Gothic ik, Latin ego, Greek ego, Sanskrit aham), me (cf. German mich, mir, Gothic mik, mīs, Latin me, Greek eme, Sanskrit mam), numbers (e.g. one, two, three, cf. Dutch een, twee, drie, Gothic ains, twai, threis (þreis), Latin unus, duo, tres, Greek oinos "ace (on dice)", duo, treis), common family relationships such as mother, father, brother, sister etc (cf. Dutch moeder, Greek meter, Latin mater, Sanskrit matṛ; mother), names of many animals (cf. German Maus, Dutch muis, Sankrit mus, Greek mys, Latin mus; mouse), and many common verbs (cf. Old High German knājan, Old Norse knā, Greek gignōmi, Latin gnoscere, Hittite kanes; to know).
Germanic words (generally words of Old English or to a lesser extent Old Norse origin) tend to be shorter than Latinate words in Modern English, and are more common in ordinary speech, and include nearly all the basic pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, modal verbs etc. that form the basis of English syntax and grammar. The shortness of the words is generally due to syncopation in Middle English (eg. OldEng hēafod > ModEng head, OldEng sāwol > ModEng soul) and to the loss of final syllables due to stress (eg. OldEng gamen > ModEng game, OldEng ǣrende > ModEng errand), not because Germanic words are inherently shorter than Latinate words. (The lengthier, higher-register words of Old English were largely forgotten following the subjugation of English after the Norman Conquest, and most of the Old English lexis devoted to literature, the arts, and sciences ceased to be productive when it fell into disuse.) Longer Latinate words in Modern English are often regarded as more elegant or educated. However, the excessive use of Latinate words is considered at times to be either pretentious or an attempt to obfuscate an issue. George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language", considered an important scrutinisation of the English language, is critical of this, as well as other perceived misuse of the language.
An English speaker is in many cases able to choose between Germanic and Latinate synonyms: come or arrive; sight or vision; freedom or liberty. In some cases, there is a choice between a Germanic derived word (oversee), a Latin derived word (supervise), and a French word derived from the same Latin word (survey); or even words derived from Norman French (e.g., warranty) and Parisian French (guarantee), and even choices involving multiple Germanic and Latinate sources are possible: sick (Old English), ill (Old Norse), infirm (French), afflicted (Latin). Such synonyms harbor a variety of different meanings and nuances, enabling the speaker to express fine variations or shades of thought. Familiarity with the etymology of groups of synonyms can give English speakers greater control over their linguistic register. See: List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English, Doublet (linguistics).
An exception to this and a peculiarity perhaps unique to a handful of languages, English included, is that the nouns for meats are commonly different from, and unrelated to, those for the animals from which they are produced, the animal commonly having a Germanic name and the meat having a French-derived one. Examples include: deer and venison; cow and beef; swine/pig and pork; and sheep and mutton. This is assumed to be a result of the aftermath of the Norman invasion, where an Anglo-Norman-speaking elite were the consumers of the meat, produced by lower classes, which happened to be largely Anglo-Saxon.[citation needed]
Since the majority of words used in informal settings will normally be Germanic, such words are often the preferred choices when a speaker wishes to make a point in an argument in a very direct way. 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 in a courtroom or an encyclopædia article.[citation needed] However, there are other Latinate words that are used in everyday speech which are not formal; these words no longer appear Latinate and oftentimes have no Germanic equivalents. For instance, the words mountain, valley, river, aunt, uncle, move, use, push and stay ("to remain") are Latinate. Likewise, the inverse can occur: acknowledge, meaningful, understanding, mindful, behaviour, forbearance, behoove, forestall, allay, rhyme, starvation, embodiment come from Anglo-Saxon, and allegiance, abandonment, debutant, feudalism, seizure, guarantee, disregard, wardrobe, disenfranchise, disarray, bandolier, bourgeoisie, debauchery, performance, furniture, gallantry are of Germanic origin, usually through the Germanic element in French, so it is oftentimes impossible to know the origin of a word based on its register.
English easily accepts technical terms into common usage and often imports new words and phrases. Examples of this phenomenon include contemporary words such as cookie, Internet and URL (technical terms), as well as genre, über, lingua franca and amigo (imported words/phrases from French, German, Italian, and Spanish, respectively). In addition, slang often provides new meanings for old words and phrases. 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
The General Explanations at the beginning of the Oxford English Dictionary states:
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 such as French (the Académie française), German (Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung), Spanish (Real Academia Española) and Italian (Accademia della Crusca), there is no academy to define officially accepted words and spellings. Neologisms are coined regularly in medicine, science, technology and other fields, and new slang is constantly developed. Some of these new words 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 or might not be widely considered as "English".
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (OED2) includes over 600,000 definitions, 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).[62]
The editors of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (475,000 main headwords) in their preface, estimate the number to be much higher. It is estimated that about 25,000 words are added to the language each year.[63]
The Global Language Monitor announced that the English language had crossed the 1,000,000-word threshold on June 10, 2009.[64] The announcement was met with strong skepticism by linguists and lexicographers,[65] though a number of non-specialist reports[66][67] accepted the figure uncritically.
Word origins
Main article: Lists of English words of international origin
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 West Germanic, with a smaller influence from the North Germanic branch) and those which are "Latinate" (Latin-derived, either directly or from Norman French or other Romance languages).
The majority (83%) of the 1,000 most common English words, and all of the 100 most common, are Germanic (though of Old English and unique to the isle).[68] Conversely, a vast majority of more advanced words from subjects such as the sciences, philosophy, math, etc. come from Latin or Greek. A noticeable number of words from astronomy, mathematics, and chemistry are from Arabic.
Numerous sets of statistics have been proposed to demonstrate the proportionate origins of English vocabulary. None, as of yet, is considered definitive by most linguists.
A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973)[69] that estimated the origin of English words as follows:
- Langue d'oïl, including French and Old Norman: 28.3%
- Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
- Other Germanic languages (including words directly inherited from Old English; does not include Germanic words coming from the Germanic element in French, Latin or other Romance languages): 25%
- Greek: 5.32%
- No etymology given: 4.03%
- Derived from proper names: 3.28%
- All other languages: less than 1%
A survey by Joseph M. Williams in Origins of the English Language of 10,000 words taken from several thousand business letters gave this set of statistics:[70]
- French (langue d'oïl): 41%
- "Native" English: 33%
- Latin: 15%
- Old Norse: 2%
- Dutch: 1%
- Other: 10%
Dutch and Low German origins
Main article: List of English words of Dutch origin
Many words describing the navy, types of ships, and other objects or activities on the water are of Dutch origin. Yacht (jacht), skipper (schipper) and cruiser (kruiser) are examples. Other words pertain to art and daily life: easel (ezel), etch (etsen), slim (slim), staple (Middle Dutch stapel "market"), slip (Middle Dutch slippen). Dutch has also contributed to English slang, e.g. spook, and the now obsolete snyder (tailor) and stiver (small coin).
Words from Low German include trade (Middle Low German trade), smuggle (smuggeln), and dollar (daler/thaler).
French origins
A large portion of English vocabulary is of French or Langues d'oïl origin, and was transmitted to English via the Anglo-Norman language spoken by the upper classes in England in the centuries following the Norman Conquest. Words of French origin include competition, mountain, art, table, publicity, police, role, routine, machine, force, and thousands of others, most of which have been anglicised to fit English rules of phonology, pronunciation and spelling, rather than those of French (with a few exceptions, for example, façade and affaire de cœur.)
Writing system
Main articles: English alphabet and English orthography
Since around the ninth century, English has been written in the Latin alphabet, which replaced Anglo-Saxon runes. The spelling system, or orthography, is multilayered, with elements of French, Latin and Greek spelling on top of the native Germanic system; it has grown to vary significantly from the phonology of the language. The spelling of words often diverges considerably from how they are spoken.
Though letters and sounds may not correspond in isolation, spelling rules that take into account syllable structure, phonetics, and accents are 75% or more reliable.[71] Some phonics spelling advocates claim that English is more than 80% phonetic.[72] However, English has fewer consistent relationships between sounds and letters than many other languages; for example, the sound sequence ough can be pronounced in 10 different ways. The consequence of this complex orthographic history is that reading can be challenging.[73] It takes longer for students to become completely fluent readers of English than of many other languages, including French, Greek, and Spanish.[74]
Basic sound-letter correspondence
See also: Hard and soft C and Hard and soft G
| IPA | Alphabetic representation | Dialect-specific |
|---|---|---|
| p | p | |
| b | b | |
| t | t, th (rarely) thyme, Thames | th thing (African American, New York) |
| d | d | th that (African American, New York) |
| k | c (+ a, o, u, consonants), k, ck, ch, qu (rarely) conquer, kh (in foreign words) | |
| g | g, gh, gu (+ a, e, i), gue (final position) | |
| m | m | |
| n | n | |
| ŋ | n (before g or k), ng | |
| f | f, ph, gh (final, infrequent) laugh, rough | th thing (many forms of English language in England) |
| v | v | th with (Cockney, Estuary English) |
| θ | th thick, think, through | |
| ð | th that, this, the | |
| s | s, c (+ e, i, y), sc (+ e, i, y), ç often c (façade/facade) | |
| z | z, s (finally or occasionally medially), ss (rarely) possess, dessert, word-initial x xylophone | |
| ʃ | sh, sch, ti (before vowel) portion, ci/ce (before vowel) suspicion, ocean; si/ssi (before vowel) tension, mission; ch (esp. in words of French origin); rarely s/ss before u sugar, issue; chsi in fuchsia only | |
| ʒ | medial si (before vowel) division, medial s (before "ur") pleasure, zh (in foreign words), z before u azure, g (in words of French origin) (+e, i, y) genre, j (in words of French origin) bijou | |
| x | kh, ch, h (in foreign words) | occasionally ch loch (Scottish English, Welsh English) |
| h | h (syllable-initially, otherwise silent), j (in words of Spanish origin) jai alai | |
| tʃ | ch, tch, t before u future, culture | t (+ u, ue, eu) tune, Tuesday, Teutonic (several dialects – see Phonological history of English consonant clusters) |
| dʒ | j, g (+ e, i, y), dg (+ e, i, consonant) badge, judg(e)ment | d (+ u, ue, ew) dune, due, dew (several dialects – another example of yod coalescence) |
| ɹ | r, wr (initial) wrangle | |
| j | y (initially or surrounded by vowels), j hallelujah | |
| l | l | |
| w | w | |
| ʍ | wh (pronounced hw) | Scottish and Irish English, as well as some varieties of American, New Zealand, and English English |
Written accents
Main article: English words with diacritics
Unlike most other Germanic languages, English has almost no diacritics except in foreign loanwords (like the acute accent in café), and in the uncommon use of a diaeresis mark (often in formal writing) to indicate that two vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as one sound (e.g. naïve, Zoë). Words such as décor, café, résumé/résumé, entrée, fiancée and naïve are frequently spelt both ways.
Some English words retain diacritics to distinguish them from others, such as animé, exposé, lamé, öre, øre, pâté, piqué, and rosé, though these are sometimes also dropped (for example, résumé/résumé is often spelt resume in the United States). To clarify pronunciation, a small number of loanwords may employ a diacritic that does not appear in the original word, such as maté, from Spanish yerba mate, following the French usage.
Formal written English
Main article: Formal written English
A version of the language almost universally agreed upon by educated English speakers around the world is called formal written English. It takes virtually the same form regardless of where it is written, in contrast to spoken English, which differs significantly between dialects, accents, and varieties of slang and of colloquial and regional expressions. Local variations in the formal written version of the language are quite limited, being restricted largely to the spelling differences between British and American English, along with a few minor differences in grammar and lexis.
Basic and simplified versions
To make English easier to read, there are some simplified versions of the language. One basic version is named Basic English, a constructed language with a small number of words created by Charles Kay Ogden and described in his book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). The language is based on a simplified version of English. Ogden said that it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English. Thus, Basic English may be employed by companies which need to make complex books for international use, as well as by language schools that need to give people some knowledge of English in a short time.
Ogden did not put any words into Basic English that could be said with a few other words and he worked to make the words work for speakers of any other language. He put his set of words through a large number of tests and adjustments. He also made the grammar simpler, but tried to keep the grammar normal for English users.
The concept gained its greatest publicity just after the Second World War as a tool for world peace.[citation needed] Although it was not built into a program, similar simplifications were devised for various international uses.
Another version, Simplified English, exists, which is a controlled language originally developed for aerospace industry maintenance manuals. It offers a carefully limited and standardised[by whom?] subset of English. Simplified English has a lexicon of approved words and those words can only be used in certain ways. For example, the word close can be used in the phrase "Close the door" but not "do not go close to the landing gear".
See also
 |
Wikipedia:Books has a book on: English language |
- Changes to Old English vocabulary
- English for Academic Purposes
- English language learning and teaching
- Language Report
- Lists of English words
- Teaching English as a foreign language
- The Story of English
- The Adventure of English (film)
References
Bibliography
- Ammon, Ulrich (2006). Sociolinguistics: an international handbook of the science of language and society. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3110184184. http://books.google.com/books?id=LMZm0w0k1c4C&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
- Baugh, Albert C.; Thomas Cable (2002). A history of the English language (5th ed.). Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28099-0.
- Bragg, Melvyn (2004). The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1-55970-710-0.
- Crystal, David (1997). English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53032-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=d6jPAKxTHRYC&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
- Crystal, David (2003). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53033-4.
- Crystal, David (2004). The Stories of English. Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9752-4.
- Halliday, MAK (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold. ISBN 0-340-55782-6.
- Hayford, Harrison; Howard P. Vincent (1954). Reader and Writer. Houghton Mifflin Company. [4]
- Howatt, Anthony (2004). A history of English language teaching. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0194421856. http://books.google.com/books?id=g2e7iw_F-ZcC&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
- Kenyon, John Samuel and Knott, Thomas Albert, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, G & C Merriam Company, Springfield, Mass, USA,1953.
- Mazrui, Alamin (1998). The power of Babel: language & governance in the African experience. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0852558074. http://books.google.com/books?id=6lQTPxdYx8kC&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
- McArthur, T. (ed.) (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-214183-X.
- McCrum; Robert MacNeil, William Cran (1986). The Story of English (1st ed.). New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-80467-3.
- Plotkin, Vulf (2006). The Language System of English. BrownWalker Press. ISBN 1-58112-993-9.
- Robinson, Orrin (1992). Old English and Its Closest Relatives. Stanford Univ. Press. ISBN 0-8047-2221-8.
- Schneider, Edgar (2007). Postcolonial English: varieties around the world. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521831407. http://books.google.com/books?id=QIE6zGSd8okC&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
- Wardhaugh, Ronald (2006). An introduction to sociolinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 140513559X. http://books.google.com/books?id=0J2VOzNYtKQC&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
Notes
 |
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2009) |
- ^ "English, a. and n." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 6 September 2007 http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50075365
- ^ see: Ethnologue (1984 estimate); The Triumph of English, The Economist, Dec. 20, 2001; Ethnologue (1999 estimate); "20,000 Teaching Jobs" (in English). Oxford Seminars. http://www.oxfordseminars.com/Tesol/Pages/Teach/teach_20000jobs.php. Retrieved 2007-02-18.;
- ^ a b "Lecture 7: World-Wide English". EHistLing. http://www.ehistling-pub.meotod.de/01_lec06.php. Retrieved 2007-03-26.
- ^ Ethnologue (1999 estimate);
- ^ Ethnologue, 2009
- ^ a b Languages of the World (Charts), Comrie (1998), Weber (1997), and the Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) 1999 Ethnologue Survey. Available at The World's Most Widely Spoken Languages
- ^ Ammon, pp. 2245–2247.
- ^ Schneider, p. 1.
- ^ Mazrui, p. 21.
- ^ Howatt, pp. 127–133.
- ^ Crystal, pp. 87–89.
- ^ Wardhaugh, p. 60.
- ^ [1]
- ^ "Global English: gift or curse?". http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=92238D4607726060BCBD3DB70C472D0F.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=291932. Retrieved 2005-04-04.
- ^ a b c d e f David Graddol (1997). "The Future of English?" (PDF). The British Council. http://www.britishcouncil.org/de/learning-elt-future.pdf. Retrieved 2007-04-15.
- ^ "The triumph of English". The Economist. 2001-12-20. http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=883997. Retrieved 2007-03-26.
- ^ "Lecture 7: World-Wide English". EHistLing. http://www.ehistling-pub.meotod.de/01_lec06.php. Retrieved 2007-03-26.
- ^ Crystal, David (2002). Language Death. Cambridge University Press. doi:. ISBN 0521012716.
- ^ Cheshire, Jenny (1991). English Around The World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. doi:. ISBN 0521395658.
- ^ Anglik English language resource
- ^ [2]
- ^ Linguistics research center Texas University
- ^ The Germanic Invasions of Western Europe, Calgary University
- ^ English Language Expert
- ^ History of English, Chapter 5 "From Old to Middle English"
- ^ David Graddol, Dick Leith, and Joan Swann, English: History, Diversity and Change (New York: Routledge, 1996), 101.
- ^ http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/old-english-language/latin-influence.html
- ^ A History of the Entlish Language|Page: 336 | By: Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable | Publisher: Routledge; 5 edition (March 21, 2002)
- ^ Curtis, Andy. Color, Race, And English Language Teaching: Shades of Meaning. 2006, page 192.
- ^ Ethnologue, 1999
- ^ CIA World Factbook, Field Listing — Languages (World).
- ^ Mair, Victor H. (1991). "What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms" (PDF). Sino-Platonic Papers. http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf.
- ^ "English language". Columbia University Press. 2005. http://columbia.tfd.com/English+language. Retrieved 2007-03-26.
- ^ 20,000 Teaching
- ^ Crystal, David (2003), English as a Global Language (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, p. 69, ISBN 9780521530323, http://books.google.com/books?id=d6jPAKxTHRYC, cited in Power, Carla (7 March 2005), "Not the Queen's English", Newsweek, http://www.newsweek.com/id/49022.
- ^ "U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003, Section 1 Population" (pdf). U.S. Census Bureau. pp. 59 pages. http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/06statab/pop.pdf. Table 47 gives the figure of 214,809,000 for those five years old and over who speak exclusively English at home. Based on the American Community Survey, these results exclude those living communally (such as college dormitories, institutions, and group homes), and by definition exclude native English speakers who speak more than one language at home.
- ^ a b The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Second Edition, Crystal, David; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, [1995] (2003-08-03).
- ^ Population by mother tongue and age groups, 2006 counts, for Canada, provinces and territories–20% sample data, Census 2006, Statistics Canada.
- ^ Census Data from Australian Bureau of Statistics Main Language Spoken at Home. The figure is the number of people who only speak English at home.
- ^ Census in Brief, page 15 (Table 2.5), 2001 Census, Statistics South Africa
- ^ "About people, Language spoken". Statistics New Zealand. 2006 census. http://www.stats.govt.nz/Census/2006-census-data/classification-counts-tables/about-people/language-spoken.aspx. Retrieved 2009-09-28. (links to Microsoft Excel files)
- ^ Subcontinent Raises Its Voice, Crystal, David; Guardian Weekly: Friday 19 November 2004.
- ^ Yong Zhao; Keith P. Campbell (1995). "English in China". World Englishes 14 (3): 377–390. Hong Kong contributes an additional 2.5 million speakers (1996 by-census).
- ^ Census of India's Indian Census, Issue 10, 2003, pp 8–10, (Feature: Languages of West Bengal in Census and Surveys, Bilingualism and Trilingualism).
- ^ Tropf, Herbert S. 2004. India and its Languages. Siemens AG, Munich
- ^ For the distinction between "English Speakers" and "English Users", see: TESOL-India (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages). Their article explains the difference between the 350 million number mentioned in a previous version of this Wikipedia article and a more plausible 90 million number:
Wikipedia's India estimate of 350 million includes two categories - "English Speakers" and "English Users". The distinction between the Speakers and Users is that Users only know how to read English words while Speakers know how to read English, understand spoken English as well as form their own sentences to converse in English. The distinction becomes clear when you consider the China numbers. China has over 200~350 million users that can read English words but, as anyone can see on the streets of China, only handful of million who are English speakers.
- ^ a b c http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=PH.
- ^ Australian Bureau of Statistics
- ^ Nancy Morris (1995), Puerto Rico: Culture, Politics, and Identity, Praeger/Greenwood, pp. 62, ISBN 0275952282, http://books.google.com/books?id=vyQDYqz2kFsC&pg=RA1-PA62&lpg=RA1-PA62&dq=%22puerto+rico%22+official+language+1993&source=web&ots=AZKLran6u3&sig=8fkQ9gwM0B0kwVYMNtXr-_9dnro
- ^ Languages Spoken in the U.S., National Virtual Translation Center, 2006.
- ^ U.S. English Foundation, Official Language Research – United Kingdom.
- ^ U.S. ENGLISH, Inc.
- ^ Multilingualism in Israel, Language Policy Research Center
- ^ International Maritime Organization
- ^ 2006 survey by Eurobarometer, in the Official EU languages website
- ^ European Union
- ^ Aitken, A. J. and McArthur, T. Eds. (1979) Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh,Chambers. p.87
- ^ Second Report submitted by the United Kingdom pursuant to article 25, paragraph 1 of the framework convention for the protection of national minorities
- ^ Peter Trudgill, The Dialects of England 2nd edition, page 125, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002
- ^ Cox, Felicity (2006). "Australian English Pronunciation into the 21st century" (PDF). Prospect 21: 3–21. http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/~felicity/Papers/Prospect_Erratum_v1.pdf. Retrieved 2007-07-22.
- ^ For the processes and triggers of English vocabulary changes cf. English and General Historical Lexicology (by Joachim Grzega and Marion Schöner)
- ^ It went on to clarify,
Hence we exclude all words that had become obsolete by 1150 [the end of the Old English era]... Dialectal words and forms which occur since 1500 are not admitted, except when they continue the history of the word or sense once in general use, illustrate the history of a word, or have themselves a certain literary currency.
- ^ Kister, Ken. "Dictionaries defined." Library Journal, 6/15/92, Vol. 117 Issue 11, p43, 4p, 2bw
- ^ 'English gets millionth word on Wednesday, site says'
- ^ Keeping it Real on Dictionary Row
- ^ [3]
- ^ Millionth English word' declared'
- ^ Old English Online
- ^ Finkenstaedt, Thomas; Dieter Wolff (1973). Ordered profusion; studies in dictionaries and the English lexicon. C. Winter. ISBN 3-533-02253-6.
- ^ Joseph M. Willams, Origins of the English Language at Amazon.com
- ^ Abbott, M. (2000). Identifying reliable generalisations for spelling words: The importance of multilevel analysis. The Elementary School Journal 101(2), 233–245.
- ^ Moats, L. M. (2001). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Company.
- ^ Diane McGuinness, Why Our Children Can't Read (New York: Touchstone, 1997) pp. 156–169
- ^ Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages. Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 3–29.
External links
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Wikiversity has learning materials about Topic:English Language |
English language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: English language |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: English language |
|
English language edition of Wiktionary, the free dictionary/thesaurus |
- Accents of English from Around the World (University of Edinburgh) Hear and compare how the same 110 words are pronounced in 50 English accents from around the world – instantaneous playback online
- Mathematical Words: Origins and Sources (John Aldrich, University of Southampton) Contains an account of the origins of the English mathematical lexicon.
- Dictionaries
- Collection of English bilingual dictionaries
- dict.org
- Dictionary of American Regional English
- English language word roots, prefixes and suffixes (affixes) dictionary
- Oxford's online dictionary
- Merriam-Webster's online dictionary
- Macquarie Dictionary Online
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 | What is the difference between the spoken english language and written english language? Read answer... |
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| What is the historical development of the English language from Old English to Modern English? Read answer... |
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Related answers
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Mentioned in
- Middle English (English language)
- American English (English language)
- Anglicist (specialist in English language and literature)
- British English (English language)
- ESL (abbreviation)
- English as a second language (in medicine)
- TEFL (abbreviation)
- TESL (abbreviation)
- Immersion (in medicine)
- mikado (of Japan)
- Burchfield, Robert (Quotes By)
- Hutchens, John K. (Quotes By)
- Julie Ege (Actor, Comedy/Horror)
- Michele Mercier (Actor, Writer, Adventure/Drama)
