A Universal Languaje

A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

English is now widely spoken on six continents, it is the primary language of the United Sates, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. English isa member of the western group of the Germanic languages (itself part of the Indo-European language family) and is closely related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic ( Dutch and Flemish).
In the 16th century, English was the mother tongue of only a few million people living in England, but owing to that nation's colonization of other parts of the global and other historical factors, Englishwas the native language of more than 350 million people by the late 20th century. English is the most widely taught foreign language and is the most widely used second language- that is, one that two people communicate in when they cannot understand each other's native speech. English became the international language of scientific and technical discourse in the 20th century and was also widelyadopted for use in business and diplomacy. In the entire world, one person in seven speaks English as either a primary or secondary language.
English is an analytic ( i.e., relatively uninflected) language, whereas European, the ancestral tongue of most European Iranian and North Indian languages, is synthetic, or inflected. (Inflections are changes in the form of words to indicate suchdistinctions as tense person, number and gender). Over thousands of years English has lost most of its inflections, while other European languages have retained more of theirs. Indeed, English is the only European language in wich adjectives have no distinctive endings, aside from the determiners and endings denoting degrees of comparison.
The lack of inflections in English allows forflexibility of function. This means that one word can function as various parts of speech in different context. For example, the word “book” can be an adjective in “book review”, a noun in “read a book” or a verb in “ book a room”. Other European languages almost never have this characteristic because they have more inflectional endings than does English. A third future of English, openness of vocabulary,allows the language to admit words freely from other languages and to create compounds and derivatives.
There are several divergences in British and American English. The greatest difference in the pronunciation of vowels is that the letter “a” is pronounced like “ah”, when it comes before an s, f, or th (as in thin). American and British consonants have the same pronunciation with twoexceptions. (1) when “r” occurs after a vowel, it is dropped in British English but pronounced in American English. (2) A “t” between two vowels is pronounced like “t” in “top” in British English, but in American English the sound is close to that of a “d”.
English is strongly stressed (accented) language. A change is stress can change the meaning of word, phrase or sentence. For example, conductstressed on the first syllable (cónduct) is noun, but a verb when stressed on the second syllable (cónduct) is a noun, but verb when stressed on the second syllable (condúct). Pitch or music al tone, may be falling-rising. Word tone, which is also called pitch, can influence the meaning of a word.
Sentence tone is called intonation and is especially important at the end of a sentence.There are three important end of sentence intonations: falling, rising, and falling-rising. The falling intonation is used in completed statements, commands, and some questions calling for “yes” or “no” answers. Rising intonation is used in statements, made with some reservation, in polite requests, intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is uded in setences that imply concession or...