English Language

English language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
English
Pronunciation /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]

Spoken in (see below)

Native speakers First language: 309–400 million
Second language: 199 million–1.4 billion[2][3]
Overall: 500 million–1.8 billion[3][4]

Language family
Indo-European
• Germanic
o West Germanic
 Anglo–Frisian
 Anglic
 English
Writing system
English alphabet(Latin script)

Official status
Regulated by
No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1
en
ISO 639-2
eng
ISO 639-3
eng

Linguasphere
52-ABA

Countries where English is an official or de facto official language, or national language, and is spoken natively by the majority of the population
,
Countries where it is an official but not primary language
This page containsIPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...

v • d • e

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military,scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, via the British Empire, and of the United States since the mid-20th century,[5][6][7][8] it has been widely dispersed around the world, become the leading language of international discourse, and has acquired use as lingua franca in many regions.[9][10] It is widely learned as a secondlanguage and used as an official language of the European Union and many Commonwealth countries, as well as in many world organizations. It is the third most natively spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.[11]
Historically, English originated from the fusion of languages and dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of GreatBritain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) settlers by the 5th century – with the word English being derived from the name of the Angles, and ultimately from their ancestral region of Angeln (in what is now Schleswig-Holstein).[12] A significant number of English words are constructed based on roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectuallife.[13] The language was further influenced by the Old Norse language due to Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries.
The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman-French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the superficial appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages[14][15] to what had now become MiddleEnglish. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events that mark the emergence of Modern English from Middle English.
Owing to the significant assimilation of various European languages throughout history, modern English contains a very large vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words, not including manytechnical or slang terms, or words that belong to multiple word classes.[16][17]
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Significance
• 2 History
• 3 Classification and related languages
• 4 Geographical distribution
o 4.1 Countries in order of total speakers
o 4.2 Countries where English is a major language
o 4.3 English as a global language
o 4.4 Dialects and regional varieties
o 4.5 Constructed varietiesof English
• 5 Phonology
o 5.1 Vowels
 5.1.1 Notes for vowels
o 5.2 Consonants
 5.2.1 Notes for consonants
 5.2.2 Voicing and aspiration
o 5.3 Supra-segmental features
 5.3.1 Tone groups
 5.3.2 Characteristics of intonation—stress
• 6 Grammar
• 7 Vocabulary
o 7.1 Number of words in English
o 7.2 Word origins
 7.2.1 French origins
 7.2.2 Old Norse origins
 7.2.3...