The primary language of several countries (including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and a second language in a number of multilingual countries (including India, Singapore, and the Philippines).
English is conventionally divided into three historical periods: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English.
Varieties of English:
African American Vernacular English, American,
Australian, Babu, Banglish, British, Canadian, Caribbean,
Chicano, Chinese, Euro-English, Hinglish, Indian, Irish, Japanese, New Zealand, Nigerian, Nonstandard English, Philippine, Scottish, Singapore, South African, Spanglish, Standard American, Standard British, Standard English, Welsh, Zimbabwean
See also:
- Basic English
- Broken English
- Controlled English
- Earliest English Dictionaries
- English As a Foreign Language
- English As a Native Language
- English As a Second Language
- English Language Timeline
- English-Only Movement
- Global English
- Globish
- Inner Circle, Outer Circle, Expanding Circle
- Linguistic Complaint
- New Englishes
- Notes on English as a Global Language
- Plain English
- A Quick Quiz on the History of the English Language
- A Quirky Quiz on the English Language
- Spoken English
- Webster's Dictionaries
- What Is Standard English?
- Why Study English?
- World English
- Written English
Etymology:
English is derived from Anglisc, the speech of the Angles (one of the three Germanic tribes that invaded England during the fifth century).
Observations:
- "We are speaking a bastard and beaten tongue with a very unusual grammatical history."
(John McWhorter, quoted by J. Schuesslert in The New York Times, June 14, 2009) - Vocabulary of the English Language
"English has borrowed words from over 350 other languages, and over three-quarters of the English lexicon is actually Classical or Romance in origin."
(David Crystal, English as a Global Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) - "Perhaps the two most salient characteristics of Present-Day English are its highly analytic grammar and its immense lexicon. Both of these features originated during the M[iddle] E[nglish] period. Although English has lost all but a handful of its inflections during ME and has undergone little inflectional change since, ME marks only the onset of the burgeoning of the English vocabulary to its current unparalleled size among the languages of the world. Ever since ME, the language has been more than hospitable to loanwords from other languages, and all subsequent periods have seen comparable influxes of loans and increases in vocabulary."
(C. M. Millward and Mary Hayes, A Biography of the English Language, 3rd ed. Wadsworth, 2012) - Word Order in English: SVO
"One of the major syntactic changes in the English language since Anglo-Saxon times has been the disappearance of the S[ubject]-O[bject]-V[erb] and V[erb]-S[ubject]-O[bject] types of word-order, and the establishment of the S[ubject]-V[erb]-O[bject] type as normal. The S-O-V type disappeared in the early Middle Ages, and the V-S-O type was rare after the middle of the seventeenth century. V-S word-order does indeed still exist in English as a less common variant, as in 'Down the road came a whole crowd of children,' but the full V-S-O type hardly occurs today."
(Charles Barber, The English Language: A Historical Introduction, rev. ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) - English as a Global Language
"Today there are about 6,000 languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only 10 of them. English is the single most dominant of these 10. British colonialism initiated the spread of English across the globe; it has been spoken nearly everywhere and has become even more prevalent since World War II, with the global reach of American power."
(Christine Kenneally, The First Word. Viking, 2007) - "How many people in the world today speak English?
First-language speakers: 375 million
Second-language speakers: 375 million
Foreign-language speakers: 750 million
(David Graddol, The Future of English? British Council, 1997)
