Biography of the english language
English language
West Germanic language
| English | |
|---|---|
| Pronunciation | |
| Native to | The English-speaking world, including the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and others |
| Speakers | L1: 380 million (2021)[2] |
Language family | |
Early forms | |
Writing system | |
Signed forms | Manually coded English(multiple systems) |
Official language in | |
| ISO 639-1 | |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | |
| Linguasphere | |
Countries and territories where English is the native language of the majority Countries and territories where English is an official or administrative language but not a majority native language | |
| This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. | |
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain after its Roman occupiers left. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the United States.[7] English is the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish; it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers.
English is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states (such as India, Ireland, and Canada). In some other countries, it is the sole or dominant language for historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law (such as in the United States and United Kingdom). It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other international and regional organisations. It has also become the de facto lingua franca of diplomacy, science, technology, international trade, logistics, tourism, aviation, entertainment, and the Internet.[10] English accounts for at least 70% of total native speakers of the Germanic languages, and Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.5 billion speakers worldwide as of 2021[update].[3]
Old English emerged from a group of West Germanic dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Late Old English borrowed some grammar and core vocabulary from Old Norse, a North Germanic language.[11] Then, Middle English borrowed vocabulary extensively from French dialects, which are the source of approximately 28% of Modern English words, and from Latin, which is the source of an additional 28%.[14] While Latin and the Romance languages are thus the source for a majority of its lexicon taken as a whole, English grammar and phonology retain a family resemblance with the Germanic languages, and most of its basic everyday vocabulary remains Germanic in origin. English exists on a dialect continuum with Scots; it is next-most closely related to Low Saxon and Frisian.