English language

• 1. Introduction

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  English began as the speech of the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who crossed into Britain after Roman rule collapsed. From those settlers came two names that endure: Ænglaland and Ænglisc, the country and the tongue. Today that tongue is the most spoken language on Earth, learned by more people as a second language than speak it from birth. It holds official status in 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, the most geographically widespread language anywhere. Yet it ranks only third among native languages, behind Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. How did a coastal dialect of the North Sea reach 1.4 billion speakers? How did a Germanic language end up borrowing most of its words from Latin and French? And why can a modern speaker not understand a single line of the English written a thousand years ago?

• 2. A North Sea Inheritance

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  Proto-Germanic is the shared ancestor that ties English to Dutch, German, and Swedish. From it English inherited strong and weak verb classes, modal verbs, and the consonant shifts described by Grimm's and Verner's laws. Old English was one of several Ingvaeonic tongues that grew from a dialect continuum spoken during the 5th century in Frisia, along the North Sea coast. While Frisian and Old Low German developed on the continent, Old English took shape among the same speakers after they reached the British Isles. Isolation reshaped it. Cut off from the continental Germanic languages, English diverged sharply in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, and it is not mutually intelligible with any of them today. English and Frisian were long thought to be especially close kin. Most modern scholarship rejects that special bond. The two shared similar sound changes, but those changes appeared at different times, a pattern unlike languages that descend from a single unique ancestor.

• 3. The Anglo-Saxon Tongue

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  From around 450, Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, was spoken across Britain as Roman administration fell away. By the 7th century it had become dominant, replacing the Common Brittonic and British Latin of the Roman period, which left little mark on it. Old English split into two Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and two Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Wessex and the educational reforms of King Alfred in the 9th century raised West Saxon into the standard written form. The epic poem Beowulf survives in West Saxon, while the earliest English poem, Cædmon's Hymn, is written in Northumbrian. Modern English descends mainly from Mercian, and the Scots language from Northumbrian. The grammar of this language would baffle a modern reader. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs carried far more inflectional endings, and word order ran much freer than today. Nouns held case endings that Modern English has shed entirely. A 21st-century speaker cannot understand Old English without special training. Short runic inscriptions came first, before a Latin alphabet was adopted by the 7th century, carrying the runic letters wynn and thorn alongside the modified letters eth and ash.

• 4. The Norse Imprint

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  Between the 8th and 11th centuries, waves of Norsemen colonised the northern British Isles, putting Old English speakers in constant contact with Old Norse. The influence ran strongest in the Danelaw around York, and those features still mark Scots and Northern English. The centre of Norse influence was Lindsey in the Midlands. After Lindsey joined the Anglo-Saxon polity in 920, English spread widely through the region. One change touches every variety of English alive today. The third-person pronouns beginning with th-, they, them, and their, came from Norse and displaced the Anglo-Saxon forms hie, him, and hera. Everyday words followed the same path. Give, get, sky, skirt, egg, and cake are all Norse loanwords that pushed aside native equivalents. The two languages stayed close enough that Old Norse kept considerable mutual intelligibility with some northern dialects of Old English.

• 5. Norman Words, Simpler Grammar

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  The Norman Conquest of 1066 is often taken as the start of Middle English. The new ruling class brought Old Norman French, and over the following decades the middle and upper classes grew bilingual. By 1150 at the latest, bilingual speakers were a majority of the aristocracy, and monolingual French speakers had nearly vanished. The Ormulum, a work by the Augustinian canon Orrm, marks the boundary, showing for the first time a blending of Old English and Anglo-Norman elements. French entered chiefly as a lexical layer over a population that stayed monolingual English. It brought words of politics, law, and prestige. The French trône appears, and from it comes the English throne. Middle English also stripped down the inflectional system, likely to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which differed in inflection but matched in form. The distinction between nominative and accusative collapsed except in pronouns, the instrumental case vanished, and the genitive narrowed to possession. Word order grew fixed as agreement simplified. From this period come Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur of 1485. In John Wycliffe's 1382 Bible, the first full English translation, Matthew 8:20 still keeps the plural suffix -n on the verb have, though the noun case endings are gone.

• 6. Vowels Shift, A Standard Forms

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  Early Modern English ran from 1500 to 1700, shaped by the Great Vowel Shift, further inflectional loss, and standardisation. The shift, dated from 1350 to 1700, moved the stressed long vowels in a chain, each change triggering the next. The word bite was once pronounced like today's beet, and the second vowel of about sounded like today's boot. This shift explains why English keeps so many Middle English spellings that no longer match the sound. English rose in prestige against Norman French during the reign of Henry V. Around 1430 the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in official documents, and a new Chancery Standard grew from the dialects of London and the East Midlands. In 1476, William Caxton brought the printing press to England and published the first printed books in London, spreading this form widely. The age produced the works of William Shakespeare and the 1611 King James Version of the Bible. Even after the vowel shift, the consonant clusters in knight, gnat, and sword were still fully pronounced. Standard usage was later fixed in print. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language, setting standard spellings and usage. In 1828, Noah Webster published the American Dictionary of the English language to establish an American norm independent of Britain.

• 7. The Reach Of A Lingua Franca

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  By the late 18th century the British Empire had carried English through its colonies into North America, Africa, and Oceania. When some newly independent states with many indigenous languages sought independence, they kept English as the official language to avoid elevating any one local tongue. American influence after the Second World War, along with worldwide broadcasting by the BBC and others, accelerated the spread. Specialised forms followed the trade routes. In 1951 the International Civil Aviation Organization recommended that Aviation English be universally adopted for international aeronautical radiotelephony. In 2001 the International Maritime Organization developed the Standard Marine Communication Phrases for use at sea. English now serves as the basis for the controlled languages Seaspeak and Airspeak. Parity with French in diplomacy was reached during the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919, and by the founding of the United Nations English had become pre-eminent, one of six official UN languages. Its grip on science is striking. Over 80 per cent of journal articles indexed by Chemical Abstracts in 1998 were in English, as were 90 per cent of natural science articles by 1996. In 2003 David Crystal estimated that non-native speakers outnumbered native speakers three to one.

• 8. Many Englishes

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  Braj Kachru sorted countries into three circles by how the language took hold. Inner-circle countries hold large native communities: the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, with the United States alone home to at least 231 million native speakers. Outer-circle countries such as the Philippines, India, Singapore, and Nigeria use English heavily as a second language in education and government. Expanding-circle countries teach it as a foreign language, though in places like the Netherlands an overwhelming majority can speak it. No national authority governs the language. English is pluricentric, its written norms held together only by the consensus of educated speakers worldwide. That openness produced a thicket of accents and dialects. England's 1,500 years of English explains its wealth of regional speech, from the Geordie of Newcastle to the Scouse of Liverpool. Received Pronunciation, the prestige broadcast accent, is spoken by only 3 per cent of the English population. Across the Atlantic, varieties such as African-American Vernacular English, Southern American English, and New York City English carry distinct sound systems. India shows the stakes plainly. It is the third-largest publisher of English-language books after the US and UK, yet less than 5 per cent of its population speaks English fluently, with native speakers numbering only in the low hundreds of thousands.