English language | Origin, History, Development, Characteristics, & Facts | Britannica
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English language
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External Websites International Journal of Information and Education Technology - World Englishes (WE) and English as Lingua Franca (ELF): Implications for English Teaching and Learning Ancient Origins - How Did it All Begin? The Rich Origins of the English Language CORE - Thai and English Consonantal Sounds: a Problem or a Potential for EFL Learning? Omniglot - English The Guardian - Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet Pressbooks - More than Words: The Intersection of Language and Culture - The History of English Academia - Introduction: English as A Lingua Franca Britannica Websites Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. English language - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) Ask the Chatbot a Question Written by David Crystal Writer and editor; Honorary Professor of Linguistics, Bangor University. Author of Language Death; Language Play; English as a Global Language; Making a Point; and many others. David Crystal , Simeon Potter Bains Professor of English Language and Philology, University of Liverpool, 1945–65. Author of Our Language and others. Simeon Potter • All Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Last Updated: Jan 29, 2025 • Article History Table of Contents Table of Contents Ask the Chatbot Key People: Samuel Johnson Charles Baudelaire Alexander Pope Dante Gabriel Rossetti Sir Richard Burton (Show more) Related Topics: Middle English language Old English language Early Modern English language African English Austral English (Show more) See all related content Top QuestionsWhat is the English language?
The English language is an Indo-European language in the West Germanic language group . Modern English is widely considered to be the lingua franca of the world and is the standard language in a wide variety of fields, including computer coding, international business, and higher education.
How many people speak English?
As of 2020 there are 1.27 billion English speakers around the world. This makes it the most spoken language, ahead of Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion speakers) and Hindi (637 million speakers). More than 50 countries officially list English as an official language.
Is African American Vernacular English a dialect of English?
There has been much public and academic debate on whether African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a dialect of English or its own separate language with African origins. In 1996 the Oakland Unified School District gained nationwide attention for officially recognizing AAVE as a second language.
Where did English come from?
Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples— Angles , Saxons , and Jutes —who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English today is a constantly changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and languages, such as Latin , French , Dutch , and Afrikaans .
Is English the official language of the United States of America?
English is not the official language of the United States of America. The country does not have an official language on the federal level. Many states, however, have passed legislation that designates English as their official language.
English language Map showing the use of the English language as a national, primary, or widely spoken language in countries around the world. (more)English language , West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to the Frisian , German , and Dutch (in Belgium called Flemish) languages. English originated in England and is the dominant language of the United States , the United Kingdom , Canada , Australia , Ireland , New Zealand , and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean . It is also an official language of India , the Philippines , Singapore , and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa , including South Africa . English is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries of the world, and it is that status that has given it the position of a global lingua franca . It is estimated that about a third of the world’s population, some two billion persons, now use English.
(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)
Origins and basic characteristics
Indo-European languages in contemporary Eurasia Approximate locations of Indo-European languages in contemporary Eurasia. (more)English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India . The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic , one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic , all extinct), North ( Icelandic , Faroese , Norwegian , Swedish , and Danish ), and West ( German , Dutch [and Flemish] , Frisian , and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections . Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig , is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.
Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic , or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit , Greek , Latin , Russian , and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese . The German and Chinese words for the noun man are exemplary . German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern . Chinese has one form: ren . English stands in between, with four forms: man, man’s, men, men’s . In English, only nouns , pronouns (as in he, him, his ), adjectives (as in big, bigger, biggest ), and verbs are inflected. English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., the tall man, the tall woman , compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta . As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has only 5 forms ( ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden ), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16.
In addition to the simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary .
Britannica Quiz Challenging Standardized Test Words Quiz: Vol. 1Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of inflections . Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of planning a table or tabling a plan , booking a place or placing a book , lifting a thumb or thumbing a lift . In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian languages , nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair , but in German one must add the suffix -er to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound , Frankfurter Buchmesse . In French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort . In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in wages board and sports editor ; or even a conjunctional group, as in prices and incomes policy and parks and gardens committee . Any word class may alter its function in this way: the ins and outs (prepositions becoming nouns), no buts (conjunction becoming noun).
Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some new process. Words from more than 350 languages have entered English in this way. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements. Although a Germanic language in its sounds and grammar , the bulk of English vocabulary is in fact Romance or Classical in origin.
Get Unlimited Access Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more. SubscribeEnglish possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the pronunciation of words; see below Orthography .