English language
English is a West Germanic language that emerged in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire and the United States. It is the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers. However, English is only the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
English is either the official language, or one of the official languages, in 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language in the world. In the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, it is the dominant language for historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law. It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other international and regional organisations. It has also become the de facto lingua franca of diplomacy, science, technology, international trade, logistics, tourism, aviation, entertainment, and the Internet. Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.4 billion speakers worldwide as of 2021.
Old English emerged from a group of West Germanic dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Early inscriptions were written with runes before a Latin-based alphabet was adopted for longer texts. Late Old English borrowed some grammar and core vocabulary from Old Norse, a North Germanic language. An evolution of the Latin alphabet, the English alphabet, fully supplanted the runic alphabet by the High Middle Ages, coinciding with the emergence of Middle English in England under Norman control. Middle English borrowed vocabulary extensively from French dialects, which are the source of approximately 28 per cent of Modern English words, and from Latin, which is the source of an additional 28 per cent. While Latin and the Romance languages are thus the source for a majority of its lexicon taken as a whole, English's grammar and phonology remain Germanic, as does most of its basic everyday vocabulary. Finally, Middle English transformed, in part through the Great Vowel Shift, into Modern English, which exists on a dialect continuum with Scots; it is next-most closely related to Low Saxon and Frisian.
Classification
English is a member of the Indo-European language family, belonging to the West Germanic branch of Germanic languages. Owing to their descent from a shared ancestor language known as Proto-Germanic, English and other Germanic languageswhich include Dutch, German, and Swedishhave characteristic features in common, including a division of verbs into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs, and sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants known as Grimm's and Verner's laws.Old English was one of several Ingvaeonic languages, which emerged from a dialect continuum spoken by West Germanic peoples during the 5th century in Frisia, on the coast of the North Sea. Old English emerged among the Ingvaeonic speakers on the British Isles following their migration there, while the other Ingvaeonic languages developed in parallel on the continent. Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern English. Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into other Anglic languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Yola dialects of Ireland.
English was isolated from other Germanic languages on the continent and diverged considerably in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology as a result. It is not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic languagethough some, such as Dutch and Frisian, show strong affinities with it, especially in its earlier stages. English and Frisian were traditionally considered more closely related to one another than they were to other West Germanic languages, but most modern scholarship does not recognise a particular affinity between them. Though they exhibited similar sound changes not otherwise found around the North Sea at that time, the specific changes appeared in English and Frisian at different timesa pattern uncharacteristic for languages sharing a unique phylogenetic ancestor.
History
Proto-Germanic to Old English
was the earliest form of the English language, spoken from to. Old English developed from a set of West Germanic dialects, sometimes identified as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic, that were originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony and southern Jutland by Germanic peoples known to the historical record as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as the Roman economy and administration collapsed. By the 7th century, Old English had become dominant in Britainreplacing the Common Brittonic and British Latin previously spoken during the Roman occupation, which ultimately left little influence on English. England and English are both named after the Angles.Old English was divided into two Anglian dialects and two Saxon dialects. Through the influence exerted by the kingdom of Wessex, and the educational reforms instated by King Alfred during the 9th century, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Cædmon's Hymn, is written in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. During the earliest period of Old English, a few short inscriptions were made using a runic alphabet. By the 7th century, a Latin alphabet had been adopted. Written with half-uncial letterforms, it included the runic letters wynn and thorn, and the modified Latin letters eth, and ash.
Old English is markedly different from Modern English, such that 21st-century English speakers are entirely unable to understand Old English without special training. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns and has a few verb inflections, but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings.
Influence of Old Norse
Between the 8th and 11th centuries, the English spoken in some regions underwent significant changes due to contact with Old Norse, a North Germanic language. Several waves of Norsemen colonising the northern British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English speakers in constant contact with Old Norse. Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in the Danelaw surrounding York; today these features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English. The centre of Norse influence was Lindsey, located in the Midlands. After Lindsey was incorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity in 920, English spread extensively throughout the region. An element of Norse influence that continues in all English varieties today is the third person pronoun group beginning with th- which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with h-.Other Norse loanwords include give, get, sky, skirt, egg, and cake, typically displacing a native Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Old Norse in this era retained considerable mutual intelligibility with some dialects of Old English, particularly northern ones.
Middle English
The Middle English period is often defined as beginning with the Norman Conquest in 1066. During the centuries that followed, English was heavily influenced by the form of Old French spoken by the new Norman ruling class that had migrated to England. Over the following decades of contact, members of the middle and upper classes, whether native English or Norman, became increasingly bilingual. By 1150 at the latest, bilingual speakers represented a majority of the English aristocracy, and monolingual French speakers were nearly non-existent. The French spoken by the Norman elite in England eventually developed into the Anglo-Norman language. The division between Old to Middle English can also be placed during the composition of the Ormulum, a work by the Augustinian canon Orrm which highlights blending of Old English and Anglo-Norman elements in the language for the first time.As the lower classes, who represented the vast majority of the population, remained monolingual English speakers, a primary influence of Norman was as a lexical superstratum, introducing a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains. For instance, the French word trône appears for the first time, from which the English word throne is derived. Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar. The distinction between nominative and accusative cases was lost except in personal pronouns, the instrumental case was dropped, and the use of the genitive case was limited to indicating possession. The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms, and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible.
Middle English literature includes Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer. In the first translation of the entire Bible into English by John Wycliffe, Matthew 8:20 reads: Here the plural suffix -n on the verb have is still retained, but none of the case endings on the nouns are present.