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English language
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US History Encyclopedia:
English Language
The English language has its origins in about the fifth century A.D., when tribes from the continent, the Jutes, the Saxons, and then the larger tribe of Angles invaded the small island we now call England (from Angle-land). Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, is preserved in Beowulf (c. A.D. 800). Middle English developed following the Norman invasion of 1066, exemplified in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1400). Modern English, dating from the sixteenth century, is exemplified in the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). From the time the Pilgrims landed in America (1620), the language began to take its own course in this "New World." Expressions like "fixing to," which had never been used in England, were "cropping up" (an expression going back to Middle English) in the colonial press by 1716.
So the American Revolution (1775–1783) not only created a new nation but also divided the English language into what H. L. Mencken, author of the classic study The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, called "two streams." These streams diverged to produce different words with the same denotation (the American "trunk" of a car is a "boot" in England), different pronunciations for the same words (the American sked-ju-el is the British shed-ju-el), and different spellings (theater vs. theatre, labor vs. labour).
By 1781, the word "Americanism" had been coined by John Witherspoon, a Scottish clergyman recruited to become president of Princeton University. These Americanisms, Witherspoon wrote, were not "worse in themselves, but merely …of American and not of English growth." The separation of the "two streams of English" was already noticeable. In his usual acerbic manner, Mencken applauded the American resistance to rules: "Standard [British] English must always strike an American as a bit stilted and precious" (p. 774).
Judgment by Language: the Shibboleth
Once there is any kind of "standard," people could begin passing judgment (that's spelled "judgement" in England) based on what was deemed "correct." One of the first recorded instances is the "shibboleth" test in the Old Testament. Hebrew, like all other languages, had many dialects, and the twelve tribes of Israel did not always pronounce words in the same way. Thus, when the Gileadites "seized the fords of the Jordan" (Judg. 12:5–6), it was not enough to merely ask those who wished to cross the river "Are you an Ephraimite?" They needed a test to distinguish the enemy. They used pronunciation, and those who said "sib-bo-leth" instead of "shib-bo-leth" were slain.
Americans are by and large more tolerant of language differences than the English. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the Englishman who wrote Pygmalion (on which the musical My Fair Lady was based), wrote, "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Shaw was, like Mencken, a great debunker and exploder of pretension. "An honest and natural slum dialect," he wrote, "is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically un-taught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club" (Mencken, p. 775).
Dialects: the Branches of the Stream
Shaw's comment raises a point worth highlighting: we all speak a dialect. If English, in Mencken's phrase, divides into "two streams," British and American, there are within those streams many creeks and branches (two Americanisms according to Witherspoon). Both Cockney and "the Queen's English" are, after all, dialects of British English, although one carries more prestige.
Likewise, we have many dialects in the United States. Mark Twain, in his prefatory note to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells us that there are at least seventeen distinguishable dialects in the novel. In the early twenty-first century we find many dialects of American English as we move from the New York Bronx to Charleston, or from the Midwestern plains to the San Fernando Valley (home of the "valley girls"), or from Chicago to New Orleans (is that pronounced with the stress on the first or the second syllable: ore-leans or ore-lens?) Is there such a thing today as a "standard" American language?
Guides to Correctness
Certainly there have been those willing to provide guidance to the public on "correct" usage of the language. America's most famous lexicographer, Noah Webster, published his "Blue-backed" American Speller soon after the Revolution, teaching not only spelling but also pronunciation, common sense, morals, and good citizenship. His first dictionary (1806) was one of several (the first in English being Samuel Johnson's in 1755), but when Webster died in 1843, the purchase of rights to his dictionary by Charles and George Merriam led to a new, one-volume edition that sold for six dollars in 1847. This edition became the standard. Except for the Bible, Webster's spelling book and dictionary were the best-selling publications in American history up to the mid-twentieth century.
Webster's spelling book (often marketed with the Bible) molded four generations of American schoolchildren, proclaiming what was "right" without apology. In contrast, The American Heritage Dictionary of the late twentieth century offers guidance based on a survey of its "Usage Panel," a group of respected writers and speakers who are asked what they find acceptable. In the third college edition (1997), the editors note drastic changes in the Panel's attitudes. More and more of the old shibboleths are widely accepted. For example, in 1969 most of the Usage Panel objected to using the words "contact" and "intrigue" as verbs, but by the 1993 survey, most had no problem with either (though "hopefully" and "disinterested" remained problematic for most). Language, if it is spoken, lives and changes (in contrast to a "dead language" such as Latin, which does not evolve because it is not spoken). As with a river, so with language: you never put your tongue to the same one twice.
Lexicographers now present their dictionaries as a description of how the language looks at a particular time rather than as a prescription of what is "correct." The constant evolution of language makes new editions necessary. Many people have come to use the word "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" instead of "without bias"; therefore, despite objections of purists, it does in fact mean that. "Corruption" or change?
Likewise with pronunciation. In the 1990s, the word "harass" came into frequent use in the news. Americans had traditionally put the stress on the second syllable: he-RASS. This pronunciation, according to The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide (1999), "first occurred in American English and has gained wide acceptance over the last 50 years." But reporters on television during the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, in which he was accused of "sexual harassment" by Anita Hill, tended to prefer the pronunciation HAR-ess, "the older, more traditional pronunciation [which] is still preferred by those for whom British pronunciation is a guide." There are many influences on our shifting language habits.
Simplification Movement
Pragmatic Americans have often sought to simplify the language. The Simplified Spelling Board, created in 1906, sought to simplify the spelling of words like "though." "But tho their filosofy was that simpler is better, they cood not get thru to peepl as they wisht." The Chicago Tribune began to simplify spelling in their publication in 1935, but the American public would not send their brides down the "aile" nor transport their loved ones' caskets in a "herse," so the attempt was largely abandoned with a few exceptions, such as "tho," "thru," and "catalog." Spelling, after all, has often been used as a test of intelligence and education. It also reflects the history of the language. The word "knight" carries with it the echoes of Chaucer's Middle English pronunciation: ka-nick-te.
Another major impediment to spelling reform is the association of phonetic spelling with illiteracy: while the reformers may "ake" to "berry" those men and "wimmen" who "apose" them, those who write of the "kat's tung" open themselves to ridicule. Mencken declared, however, that "American spelling is plainly better than English spelling, and in the long run it seems sure to prevail" (p. 483).
Growing Vocabulary
One distinctive aspect of the English language is its tendency to absorb foreign words. English-speaking peoples (many of them explorers and adventurers) have adopted and adapted terms from many languages. Loanwords come from many foreign languages, sometimes directly, sometimes through other languages: dirge (Latin), history (Greek), whiskey (Celtic), fellow (Scandinavian), sergeant (French), chocolate (Spanish), umbrella (Italian), tattoo (German), sugar (Arabic), kowtow (Chinese), banana (African), moccasin (Native American).
Table 1
| Trends in New Word Formation, 1900–2000 | ||
| Category producing | ||
| Decade | the most new words | Example |
| 1900–1910 | cars | accelerator |
| 10s | war | flame-thrower (from the German Flammenwerfer) |
| 20s | clothes | bathing beauty, threads (slang for clothes) |
| 30s | war | decrypt, fifth column, flak |
| 40s | war | ground zero, radar |
| 50s | media | teleconference, Xerox |
| 60s | computer | interface, cursor |
| 70s | computer | hard disk, microprocessor |
| 80s | media | cyberspace, dish (TV antenna), shock jock |
| 90s | politics | Generation X, off-message |
Sometimes new words have to be created. In a survey of new words in the twentieth century, John Ayto found an interesting correlation between neologisms and the events and inventions of the times. Consider the list shown in Table 1.
Promoting and Resisting One "standard"
One of the great forces for molding a common American English since the mid-twentieth century has been the media, especially television. During the first decades of television news coverage, reporters and anchors were expected to have or to adopt a Midwestern accent, the least distinctive and most generally understandable, the most "American" as it were. This tended to promote a common "American" accent. As the century grew to a close, however, ethnic groups grew in size and multiculturalism became a potent force in society. More dialects (and more ethnicity in general) began to show up on the screen. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush emphasized his ability to speak Spanish.
This increasing power of groups who spoke English as a second language or not at all led to a widespread call for "English only" laws in the 1980s and 1990s, though the movement never achieved critical mass. On the other end of the political spectrum were those who argued that teachers should use the vernacular of the pupils in order to help them learn. Great arguments swirled around the terms "Ebonics" and "bilingual education."
The International Language
English has replaced French as the international language for many reasons: the political, military, and economic dominance of the United States since World War II (1939–1945), of course, but also the influence of American culture, especially movies, television, and rock music. We were well on our way to this position before Pearl Harbor drew us into war in 1941. Mencken attributes this partly to the "dispersion of the English-speaking peoples," but in typical Mencken style goes on to say that those peoples "have been, on the whole, poor linguists, and so they have dragged their language with them, and forced it upon the human race." Robert MacNeil, in the fascinating study of the English language for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), The Story of English (1986), observed that when landing in Rome, an Italian pilot flying an Italian airliner converses with the control tower in English.
The Digital Word
Just as the printing press, widely used throughout Europe by 1500, changed our use of words, leading to new written forms such as the novel and the newspaper, so the computer has created change. E-mail, chat rooms, and Web pages have made words on the screen almost as common as on the printed page. We already see changes taking place, as onscreen language becomes more informal (often creating new words, such as "online"). Words get shortened: electronic mail becomes e-mail, which in turn becomes email. Note, however, that this is not new. "Today" was spelled "to-day" in the early twentieth century.
We many need help "navigating the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era," according to Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age (version 1.0, 1996, with 2.0 published in 1999). The online experience has spawned various means of conveying tone including acronyms (such as LOL for "laughing out loud" and IRL for "in real life" —as distinguished from the virtual world of cyberspace) and emoticons such as >: D for "demonic laughter" and >: P for "sticking tongue out at you." English continues to change with influences of all kinds.
Finding Guidance Amid the Flux
The two streams continue to evolve, of course, and the purists like William Safire and John Simon continue to preach against the "corruption" of the language. But like the river, the English language will flow whither it will. Two of the most respected guides in the midst of this flux are both in third editions.
The Elements of Style, praised as the best of its kind by professional writers for over four decades, is E. B. White's revision of his professor's book. William Strunk's "little book" (1918) so impressed White as a college freshman that decades later he revised Strunk's original (which can be found on the Internet) into this thin volume in praise of conciseness and precision in writing. It has never been out of print since 1959 when the first edition was published, is still in print and praised as the best of its kind by professional writers.
The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996) shows tolerance for expressions that Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) would have never allowed in his first edition in 1926. The third edition, unlike the first two, lists as one of three meanings for "fix": the "American expression 'to be fixing to,' meaning 'to prepare to, intend, be on the point of.'" This guide, one of the most esteemed in print, labels it "informal" and notes that it is "hardly ever encountered outside the US." American English continues to evolve and standards continue to change.
Bibliography
Ayto, John. Twentieth-Century Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Burchfield, R. W., ed. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Widely respected guide to "correct" usage.
Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. 4thed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Classic work on semantics.
Hale, Constance, and Jessie Scanlon. Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Wired magazine is an influential publication about computer technology.
Mencken, H. L. The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. Raven I. McDavid, Jr., ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Classic readable and influential examination of the new stream.
McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Viking, 1986. This book is a companion to the excellent PBS television series available on videotape.
Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Pyles, Thomas, and John Algeo. The Origins and Development of the English Language. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
Strunk, William Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
—William E. King
Columbia Encyclopedia:
English language,
member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Spoken by about 470 million people throughout the world, English is the official language of about 45 nations. It is the mother tongue of about 60 million persons in the British Isles, from where it spread to many other parts of the world owing to British exploring, colonizing, and empire-building from the 17th through 19th cent. It is now also the first language of an additional 228 million people in the United States; 16.5 million in Canada; 17 million in Australia; 3 million in New Zealand and a number of Pacific islands; and approximately 15 million others in different parts of the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Asia. As a result of such expansion, English is the most widely scattered of the great speech communities. It is also the most commonly used auxiliary language in the world. The United Nations uses English not only as one of its official languages but also as one of its two working languages.
The changes are more radical than they appear, for Modern English ō and ā are diphthongs. The words home, stones, and name exemplify the fate of unaccented vowels, which became ə, then ə disappeared. In Old English important inflectional contrasts depended upon the difference between unaccented vowels; so, as these vowels coalesced into ə and this disappeared, much of the case system disappeared too. In Modern English a different technique, word order (subject + predicate + object), is used to show what a case contrast once did, namely, which is the actor and which the goal of the action.
There are many dialect areas; in England and S Scotland these are of long standing, and the variations are striking; the Scottish dialect especially has been cultivated literarily. There are newer dialect differences also, such as in the United States, including regional varieties such as Southern English, and cultural varieties, such as Black English. Standard forms of English differ also; thus, the standard British (“the king's English”) is dissimilar to the several standard varieties of American and to Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Indian English.
History of English
Today's English is the continuation of the language of the 5th-century Germanic invaders of Britain. No records exist of preinvasion forms of the language. The language most closely related to English is the West Germanic language Frisian. The history of English is an aspect of the history of the English people and their development. Thus in the 9th cent. the standard English was the dialect of dominant Wessex (see Anglo-Saxon literature). The Norman Conquest (11th cent.) brought in foreign rulers, whose native language was Norman French; and English was eclipsed by French as the official language. When English became again (14th cent.) the language of the upper class, the capital was London, and the new standard (continued in Modern Standard English) was a London dialect.
It is convenient to divide English into periods—Old English (or Anglo-Saxon; to c.1150), Middle English (to c.1500; see Middle English literature), and Modern English; this division implies no discontinuity, for even the hegemony of French affected only a small percentage of the population. The English-speaking areas have expanded at all periods. Before the Normans the language was spoken in England and S Scotland, but not in Cornwall, Wales, or, at first, in Strathclyde. English has not completely ousted the Celtic languages from the British Isles, but it has spread vastly overseas.
A Changed and Changing Language
Like other languages, English has changed greatly, albeit imperceptibly, so that an English speaker of 1300 would not have understood the English of 500 nor the English of today. Changes of every sort have taken place concomitantly in the sounds (phonetics), in their distribution (phonemics), and in the grammar (morphology and syntax). The following familiar words show changes of 1,000 years:
Although the pronunciation of English has changed greatly since the 15th cent., the spelling of English words has altered very little over the same period. As a result, English spelling is not a reliable guide to the pronunciation of the language.
The vocabulary of English has naturally expanded, but many common modern words are derived from the lexicon of the earliest English; e.g., bread, good, and shower. From words acquired with Latin Christianity come priest, bishop, and others; and from words adopted from Scandinavian settlers come root, egg, take, window, and many more. French words, such as castle, began to come into English shortly before the Norman Conquest. After the Conquest, Norman French became the language of the court and of official life, and it remained so until the end of the 14th cent.
During these 300 or more years English remained the language of the common people, but an increasingly large number of French words found their way into the language, so that when the 14th-century vernacular revival, dominated by Chaucer and Wyclif, restored English to its old place as the speech of all classes, the French element in the English vocabulary was very considerable. To this phase of French influence belong most legal terms (such as judge, jury, tort, and assault) and words denoting social ranks and institutions (such as duke, baron, peer, countess, and parliament), together with a great number of other words that cannot be classified readily—e.g., honor, courage, season, manner, study, feeble, and poor. Since nearly all of these French words are ultimately derived from Late Latin, they may be regarded as an indirect influence of the classical languages upon the English vocabulary.
The direct influence of the classical languages began with the Renaissance and has continued ever since; even today Latin and Greek roots are the chief source for English words in science and technology (e.g., conifer, cyclotron, intravenous, isotope, polymeric, and telephone). During the last 300 years the borrowing of words from foreign languages has continued unchecked, so that now most of the languages of the world are represented to some extent in the vocabulary. English vocabulary has also been greatly expanded by the blending of existing words (e.g., smog from smoke and fog) and by back-formations (e.g., burgle from burglar), whereby a segment of an existing word is treated as an affix and dropped, resulting in a new word, usually with a related meaning.
Bibliography
See H. L. Mencken, The American Language (rev. 4th ed. 1963); G. W. Turner, The English Language in Australia and New Zealand (1966);M. Pei, The Story of the English Language (new ed. 1968); P. Roberts, Modern Grammar (1968); M. M. Orkin, Speaking Canadian English (1971); T. Pyles and J. Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language (3d ed. 1982); W. F. Bolton, A Living Language (1982); B. Kachru, ed., The Other Tongue (1982); R. Hudson, Invitation to Linguistics (1984); J. Baugh, Black Street Speech (1985); The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (2d ed. 1987).
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Wikipedia:
English language
| English | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[37] | |
| Spoken in: | Listed in the article | |
| Total speakers: | First language: 309[38] – 380 million[3] Second language: 199[39] – 600 million[40] Overall: 1.8 billion[41] |
|
| Ranking: | 3 (native speakers)[9][10] Total: 1 or 2 [11] |
|
| Language family: | Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Anglo–Frisian Anglic English |
|
| Writing system: | Latin (English variant) | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | 53
countries United Nations |
|
| Regulated by: | no official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | en | |
| ISO 639-2: | eng | |
| ISO 639-3: | eng | |
 World countries, states, and provinces where English is a primary language are dark blue; countries,
states and provinces where it is an official but not a primary language are light blue. English is also one of the
official languages of the European Union.
|
||
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See Help:IPA English pronunciation key for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
English is a West Germanic language originating in England, and the first language for most people in Australia, Canada, the Commonwealth Caribbean, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America (also commonly known as the Anglosphere). It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language throughout the world, especially in Commonwealth countries and in many international organisations.
Modern English is sometimes described as the global lingua franca.[1][2] English is the dominant international language in communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy.[3] The influence of the British Empire is the primary reason for the initial spread of the language far beyond the British Isles.[4] Following World War II, the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States has significantly accelerated the spread of the language.
A working knowledge of English is required in certain fields, professions, and occupations. As a result over a billion people speak English at least at a basic level (see English language learning and teaching). English is one of six official languages of the United Nations.
History
English is an Anglo-Frisian language. Germanic-speaking peoples from northwest Germany (Saxons and Angles) and Jutland (Jutes) invaded what is now known as Eastern England around the fifth century AD. It is a matter of debate whether the Old English language spread by displacement of the original population, or the native Celts gradually adopted the language and culture of a new ruling class, or a combination of both of these processes (see Sub-Roman Britain).
Whatever their origin, these Germanic dialects eventually coalesced to a degree (there remained geographical variation) and
formed what is today called Old English. Old English loosely resembles some coastal dialects in what are now northwest Germany
and the Netherlands (i.e., Frisia). Throughout the history of written Old English, it retained a
The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 profoundly influenced the evolution
of the language. For about 300 years after this, the Normans used Anglo-Norman,
which was close to Old French, as the language of the court, law and administration. By the
fourteenth century,
During the fifteenth century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a prestigious South Eastern-based dialect in the court, administration and academic life, and the standardising effect of printing. Early Modern English can be traced back to around the Elizabethan period.
Classification and related languages
The English language belongs to the western sub-branch of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.
The question as to which is the nearest living relative of English is a matter of discussion. Apart from such English-lexified creole languages such as Tok Pisin, Scots (spoken primarily in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland) is not a Gaelic language, but is part of the English family of languages: both Scots and modern English are descended from Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon. The closest relative to English after Scots is Frisian, which is spoken in the Northern Netherlands and Northwest Germany. Other less closely related living West Germanic languages include German, Low Saxon, Dutch, and Afrikaans. The North Germanic languages of Scandinavia are less closely related to English than the West Germanic languages.
Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (though pronunciations
are often quite different) because English absorbed a large vocabulary from Norman and
French, via
Geographical distribution
Over 380 million people speak English as their first language. English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.[9][10] However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world, though possibly second to a combination of the Chinese Languages, depending on whether or not distinctions in the latter are classified as "languages" or "dialects."[11][12] Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to over a billion depending on how literacy or mastery is defined.[13][14] There are some who claim that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.[15]
The countries with the highest populations of native English speakers are, in descending order: United States (215
million),[16] United Kingdom (58
million),[17] Canada (17.7 million),[18] Australia (15 million),[19] Ireland (3.8 million),[17] South Africa (3.7 million),[20] and New Zealand (3.0-3.7 million).[21] Countries such as Jamaica and
Nigeria also have millions of native speakers of dialect
continuums ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard
version of English. Of those nations where English is spoken as a second language, India has the most such speakers
('
| Country | Native speakers | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 
|
214,809,000[16] |
| 2 | 
UK |
58,200,000[17] |
| 3 |  Canada |
17,694,830[18] |
| 4 |  Australia |
15,013,965[19] |
| 5 |  Ireland |
4,200,000+ (Approx)[17] |
| 6 |  South Africa |
3,673,203[20] |
| 7 |  New Zealand |
3,500,000+ (Approx)[21] |
| 8 |  Singapore |
665,087[24] |
English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Belize, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey (Guernsey English), Guyana, Ireland (Hiberno-English), Isle of Man (Manx English), Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, Nauru, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the United States (various forms of American English).
In many other countries, where English is not the most spoken language, it is an official language; these countries include Botswana, Cameroon, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Ghana, Gambia, India, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It is also one of the 11 official languages that are given equal status in South Africa ("South African English"). English is also an important language in several former colonies or current dependent territories of the United Kingdom and the United States, such as in Hong Kong and Mauritius.
English is not an official language in either the United States or the United Kingdom.[25][26] Although the United States federal government has no official languages, English has been given official status by 30 of the 50 state governments.[27]
English as a global language
- See also: English on the Internet and global language
Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "global language", the lingua franca of the modern era.[2] While English is not an official language in many countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a second language around the world. Some linguists believe that it is no longer the exclusive cultural sign of "native English speakers", but is rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it continues to grow. It is, by international treaty, the official language for aerial and maritime communications, as well as one of the official languages of the European Union, the United Nations, and most international athletic organisations, including the International Olympic Committee.
English is the language most often studied as a foreign language in the European Union (by 89% of schoolchildren), followed by French (32%), German (18%), and Spanish (8%).[28] In the EU, a large fraction of the population reports being able to converse to some extent in English. Among non-English speaking countries, a large percentage of the population claimed to be able to converse in English in the Netherlands (87%), Sweden (85%), Denmark (83%), Luxembourg (66%), Finland (60%), Slovenia (56%), Austria (53%), Belgium (52%), and Germany (51%). [29] Norway and Iceland also have a large majority of competent English-speakers.
Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around the world. English is also the most commonly used language in the sciences.[2] In 1997, the Science Citation Index reported that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries.
Dialects and regional varieties
The expansion of the British Empire and—since WWII—the primacy of the United States have spread English throughout the globe.[2] Because of that global spread, English has developed a host of English dialects and English-based creole languages and pidgins.
The major
Scots developed — largely independently — from the same origins, but following the Acts of Union 1707 a process of language attrition began, whereby successive generations adopted more and more features from English causing dialectalisation. Whether it is now a separate language or a dialect of English better described as Scottish English is in dispute. The pronunciation, grammar and lexis of the traditional forms differ, sometimes substantially, from other varieties of English.
Because of the wide use of English as a second language, English speakers have many different
Just as English itself has borrowed words from many different languages over its history, English loanwords now appear in a great many languages around the world, indicative of the technological and cultural influence of its speakers. Several pidgins and creole languages have formed using an English base, such as Jamaican Creole, Nigerian Pidgin, and Tok Pisin. There are many words in English coined to describe forms of particular non-English languages that contain a very high proportion of English words. Franglais, for example, is used to describe French with a very high English word content; it is found on the Channel Islands. Another variant, spoken in the border bilingual regions of Québec in Canada, is called FrEnglish.
Constructed varieties of English
- Basic English is simplified for easy international use. It is used by manufacturers and other international businesses to write manuals and communicate. Some English schools in Asia teach it as a practical subset of English for use by beginners.
- Special English is a simplified version of English used by the Voice of America. It uses a vocabulary of only 1500 words.
- English reform is an attempt to improve collectively upon the English language.
- Seaspeak and the related Airspeak and Policespeak, all based on restricted vocabularies, were designed by Edward Johnson in the 1980s to aid international cooperation and communication in specific areas. There is also a tunnelspeak for use in the Channel Tunnel.
- English as a lingua franca for Europe and Euro-English are concepts of standardising English for use as a second language in continental Europe.
- Manually Coded English — a variety of systems have been developed to represent the English language with hand signals, designed primarily for use in deaf education. These should not be confused with true sign languages such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language used in Anglophone countries, which are independent and not based on English.
- E-Prime excludes forms of the verb to be.
Euro-English (also EuroEnglish or Euro-English) terms are English translations of European concepts that are not native to English-speaking countries. Due to the United Kingdom's (and even the Republic of Ireland's) involvement in the European Union, the usage focuses on non-British concepts. This kind of Euro-English was parodied when English was "made" one of the constituent languages of Europanto.
Phonology
Vowels
Notes:
It is the vowels that differ most from region to region.
Where symbols appear in pairs, the first corresponds to American English, General American accent; the second corresponds to British English, Received Pronunciation.
- American English lacks this sound; words with this sound are pronounced with /ɑ/ or /ɔ/.
- Many dialects of North American English do not have this vowel. See Cot-caught merger.
- The North American variation of this sound is a rhotic vowel.
- Many speakers of North American English do not distinguish between these two unstressed vowels. For them, roses and Rosa's are pronounced the same, and the symbol usually used is schwa /ə/.
- This sound is often transcribed with /i/ or with /ɪ/.
- The diphthongs /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ are monophthongal for many General American speakers, as /eː/ and /oː/.
- The letter <U> can represent either /u/ or the iotated vowel /ju/. In BRP, if this iotated vowel /ju/ occurs after /t/, /d/, /s/ or /z/, it often triggers palatalization of the preceding consonant, turning it to /ʨ/, /ʥ/, /ɕ/ and /ʑ/ respectively, as in tune, during, sugar, and azure. In American English, palatalization does not generally happen unless the /ju/ is followed by r, with the result that /(t, d,s, z)jur/ turn to /tʃɚ/, /dʒɚ/, /ʃɚ/ and /ʒɚ/ respectively, as in nature, verdure, sure, and treasure.
- Vowel length plays a phonetic role in the majority of English dialects, and is said to be phonemic in a few dialects, such as Australian English and New Zealand English. In certain dialects of the modern English language, for instance General American, there is allophonic vowel length: vowel phonemes are realized as long vowel allophones before voiced consonant phonemes in the coda of a syllable. Before the Great Vowel Shift, vowel length was phonemically contrastive.
- This sound only occurs in non-rhotic accents. In some accents, this sound may be, instead of /ʊə/, /ɔ:/. See pour-poor merger.
- This sound only occurs in non-rhotic accents. In some accents, the schwa offglide of /ɛə/ may be dropped, monophthising and lengthening the sound to /ɛ:/.
See also
- International Phonetic Alphabet for English for more vowel charts.
Consonants
This is the English Consonantal System using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
| bilabial | labio- dental |
dental | alveolar | post- alveolar |
palatal | velar | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosive | p b | t d | k ɡ | |||||
| nasal | m | n | ŋ 1 | |||||
| flap | ɾ 2 | |||||||
| fricative | f v | θ ð 3 | s z | ʃ ʒ 4 | ç 5 | x 6 | h | |
| affricate | tʃ dʒ 4 | |||||||
| approximant | ɹ 4 | j | ||||||
| la |