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English language: the story on HearLore | HearLore
English language
The name of the language itself is a ghost of a people who vanished from history, the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to Britain after the collapse of Roman rule in the 5th century. Old English, the earliest form of the language, emerged from a dialect continuum spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes along the coasts of Frisia and Lower Saxony. By the 7th century, this language had become dominant in Britain, replacing the Common Brittonic and British Latin that had been spoken during the Roman occupation. The earliest inscriptions were written using a runic alphabet, a system of symbols carved into wood or stone, before a Latin-based alphabet was adopted for longer texts. This Latin alphabet, written with half-uncial letterforms, included special characters like wynn and thorn, which were modified from the Latin script to accommodate sounds unique to the Germanic tongue. Old English was so distinct from modern speech that a 21st-century speaker would be entirely unable to understand it without special training. Its grammar resembled that of modern German, featuring nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs with many more inflectional endings and forms, and a much freer word order. The epic poem Beowulf, composed between 975 and 1025, stands as a testament to this early era, written in the West Saxon dialect that became the standard written variety through the influence of King Alfred's educational reforms in the 9th century. The very words for England and English derive from the Angles, a people who left their mark not just on the land but on the very structure of the language that would eventually conquer the globe.
The Norse and Norman Invasions
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 brought by waves of Norsemen colonizing the northern British Isles. The center of Norse influence was Lindsey, located in the Midlands, and 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-, such as they, them, and their, which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with a different set of sounds. Other Norse loanwords include give, get, sky, skirt, egg, and cake, typically displacing a native Anglo-Saxon equivalent. The Middle English period is often defined as beginning with the Norman Conquest in 1066, when the form of Old French spoken by the new Norman ruling class migrated to England. Over the following decades, members of the middle and upper classes became increasingly bilingual, and by 1150 at the latest, bilingual speakers represented a majority of the English aristocracy. The French spoken by the Norman elite eventually developed into the Anglo-Norman language, which served as a lexical superstratum, introducing a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation, and prestigious social domains. The word throne, for instance, appears for the first time in English from the French word trône. 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, and the instrumental case was dropped. This period of linguistic fusion produced works like Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, while the lower classes, who represented the vast majority of the population, remained monolingual English speakers.
Common questions
When did the English language emerge and who were the Angles?
Old English emerged from a dialect continuum spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes along the coasts of Frisia and Lower Saxony. By the 7th century, this language had become dominant in Britain, replacing the Common Brittonic and British Latin that had been spoken during the Roman occupation.
What changes did the Great Vowel Shift cause to English pronunciation?
The Great Vowel Shift was a chain shift that affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English and fundamentally altered the sound of the language. This shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages.
How many native English speakers are there in the United States and the United Kingdom?
The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the United States with at least 231 million and the United Kingdom with 60 million. Canada has 19 million native speakers and Australia has at least 17 million native speakers.
When was the Dictionary of the English Language published by Samuel Johnson?
In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language, which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms. This publication helped establish explicit norms for standard usage that were spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications.
What is the Three Circles of English model and which countries are in the inner circle?
Braj Kachru has categorized countries into the Three Circles of English model, according to how the language historically spread in each country, how it is acquired by the populace, and the range of uses it has. Inner-circle countries have large communities of native English speakers, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
When did English become the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations?
Parity with French as a language of diplomacy had been achieved by Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919, and by the time the United Nations was founded at the end of World War II, English had become pre-eminent. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations and is now the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations.
The period of Early Modern English, lasting between 1500 and 1700, was characterized by the Great Vowel Shift, a chain shift that affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English and fundamentally altered the sound of the language. This shift was a chain reaction where mid and open vowels were raised, and close vowels were broken into diphthongs. For example, the word bite was originally pronounced as the word beet is today, and the second vowel in the word about was pronounced as the word boot is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages. Even after the vowel shift, the language still sounded different from Modern English; for instance, the consonant clusters in knight, gnat, and sword were still pronounced. English began to rise in prestige relative to Norman French during the reign of Henry V, and around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents. A new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard, developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands. In 1476, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England, which began publishing the first printed books in London and expanded the influence of this form of English. Literature in Early Modern English includes the works of William Shakespeare and the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, which exemplifies the loss of case and its effects on sentence structure, such as the replacement with subject-verb-object word order and the use of of instead of the non-possessive genitive.
The Empire and the Dictionary
By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance, making it the first truly global language. Commerce, science, technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language, and it facilitated worldwide international communication. English was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Oceania, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly independent states that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. In the 20th century, the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War caused the language to spread across the planet much faster. In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been. As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language, which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms. In 1828, Noah Webster published the American Dictionary of the English Language to try to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatized, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.
The Three Circles of English
Braj Kachru has categorized countries into the Three Circles of English model, according to how the language historically spread in each country, how it is acquired by the populace, and the range of uses it has. Inner-circle countries have large communities of native English speakers, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English. The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the United States with at least 231 million, the United Kingdom with 60 million, Canada with 19 million, and Australia with at least 17 million. In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents, and local people who speak other languages and new immigrants learn English to communicate in their neighborhoods and workplaces. Outer-circle countries, such as the Philippines, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Nigeria, have much smaller proportions of native English speakers, but use of English as a second language in education, government, or domestic business is significant. These countries have millions of native speakers on dialect continua, which range from English-based creole languages to standard varieties of English used in inner-circle countries. Expanding-circle countries are where English is taught as a foreign language, though the character of English as a first, second, or foreign language in a given country is often debatable. In countries like the Netherlands, an overwhelming majority of the population can speak English, and it is often used in higher education and to communicate with foreigners. English is the largest language by number of speakers, spoken by communities on every continent, with estimates of second language and foreign-language speakers varying greatly depending on how proficiency is defined, from 470 million to more than 1 billion.
The Global Lingua Franca
Modern English is sometimes described as the first global lingua franca, or as the first world language, and it is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. Parity with French as a language of diplomacy had been achieved by Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919, and by the time the United Nations was founded at the end of World War II, English had become pre-eminent. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations and is now the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations. Many other worldwide international organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, specify English as a working language or official language of the organization. English serves as the basis for the required controlled natural languages Seaspeak and Airspeak, used as international languages of seafaring and aviation. English is the most frequently taught foreign language in the world, and most people learning English do so for practical reasons, as opposed to ideological reasons. In EU countries, English is the most widely spoken foreign language in 19 of the 25 member states where it is not an official language. In a 2012 official Eurobarometer poll, 38 percent of the EU respondents outside the countries where English is an official language said they could speak English well enough to have a conversation in that language. The global influence of English has led to concerns about language death and to claims of linguistic imperialism, and has provoked resistance to the spread of English, however, the number of speakers continues to increase because many people around the world think English provides them with better employment opportunities and increased quality of life. Working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine and computing, and English now dominates the field of scientific publishing, with over 80 percent of scientific journal articles indexed by Chemical Abstracts in 1998 written in English.
The Mechanics of Speech
English phonology and phonetics differ from one dialect to another, usually without interfering with mutual communication, and phonological variation affects the inventory of phonemes, the speech sounds that distinguish meaning. Most English dialects share the same 24 consonant phonemes, or 26 if marginal and glottal stop are included, and the consonant inventory shown is valid for California English and for Received Pronunciation. In Received Pronunciation, the lateral approximant has two main allophones, the clear or plain l, as in light, and the dark or velarised l, as in full. General American has dark l in most cases, and all sonorants devoice when following a voiceless obstruent. The pronunciation of vowels varies a great deal between dialects and is one of the most detectable aspects of a speaker's accent. In Received Pronunciation, vowel length is phonemic, with long vowels marked with a triangular colon, whereas in General American, vowel length is non-distinctive. English dialects are classified as rhotic or non-rhotic depending on whether they elide the r sound like Received Pronunciation or keep it like General American. There is complex dialectal variation in words with the open front and open back vowels, and these four vowels are only distinguished in Received Pronunciation, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In General American, these vowels merge to three, and in Canadian English, they merge to two. Some conservative varieties like Scottish English have a voiceless sound in whine that contrasts with the voiced sound in wine, but most other dialects pronounce both words with voiced w, a dialect feature called the wine-whine merger.
The Structure of Thought
Typical for an Indo-European language, English grammar follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment, but unlike other Indo-European languages, English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system in favor of analytic constructions. Only the personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class, and English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions. English has moved from the Germanic verb-second word order to being almost exclusively subject-verb-object, and the combination of SVO order and use of auxiliary verbs often creates clusters of two or more verbs at the center of the sentence. The subject constituent precedes the verb and the object constituent follows it, and the grammatical roles of each constituent are marked only by the position relative to the verb. An exception is found in sentences where one of the constituents is a pronoun, in which case it is doubly marked, both by word order and by case inflection. English does not have future verb forms, and the future tense is expressed periphrastically with one of the auxiliary verbs will or shall. Many varieties also use a near future constructed with the phrasal verb be going to, and the future tense is expressed periphrastically with one of the auxiliary verbs will or shall. Questions are marked by do-support, wh-movement, and word order inversion with some verbs, and the verb do can be used as an auxiliary even in simple declarative sentences, where it usually serves to add emphasis. The class of determiners is used to specify the noun they precede in terms of definiteness, and the noun must agree with the number of the determiner. The personal interrogative pronoun who is the only interrogative pronoun to still show inflection for case, with the variant whom serving as the objective case form, although this form may be going out of use in many contexts.