THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD

English has always been a connection to a lot of things such as cultures, art, styles and a
huge part of history everywhere. It’s influence all around the world gives us a clue of how
powerful the language is and what it stands for. It stands for an origin diversity, a meaningful
and aesthetically beautiful part of communication. English first settlements were in Great
Britain and then developed all around the world, it all started in the year 500 a.c with the rise
of three tribes from Denmark and Northern Germany, they were called The Angles, The
Saxons and the Jutes, soon enough they travelled through the North Sea to the British Isles,
as a consequence of this migration they encountered a group of people who spoke the Celtic
language and the rest came forward like a domino. As we go in depth , the anglo-saxons
separated from the jutes and we began to see the first vernacular texts as well as the
manuscripts and poems written in West Saxon, they began to appear around the second half
of the twelve century. A unique case of this matter was the poetry manuscript of Beowulf
which contained a mixture of West Saxon and Anglian.

Based on the structure that these manuscripts had we can phonologically say that some
changes like the /e;/ from Anglian to /s :d/ from West Saxon, took place. They were subtle
changes but powerful to people’s ears, no enough with this, there were other changes but in
its structure (morphology) like the new form at that time of the verb “be, such as “they are”
alongside the words “sint” or “Sidon”. The rivalry that all of these had was the Syntactic
Variation and its negative contractions. Many language constructors studied the similarities
and the differences between Anglian and West Saxon, putting in the table their vocabulary,
Lexis, word formation, affixes and so much more. At this point of time Old English had many
floss and undistinguishable stuff.

Entering to the Middle English period acknowledge that it became the dialectal phase of
English being the one with more communication and speaking than others. It specializes in
the dialectal variation that we saw in branches like Chaucer’s literature or with more
intriguing chapters of it like the revolution caused by the publication in 1986 of a linguistic
Atlas of Late Medieval English. The italicization of French loanwords and underlined
Scandinavian words were part of all these structures, ones that were the most influential
factors on M.E. along side Latin and Old Norse.

As a side view we can comment on the Scottish interlude that served by being the dialects
whom meaning was unclear and had to be researched on a deeper lever to study its
terminology, these settlements stablished foots for the first time in the second half of the sixth
century. When the Gaelic-speaking population emerge Gaelic was under threat from English,
consequently the development of Anglo-Scottish began and the accession of the Scottish to
the throne took place. All of these developed the War Of Independence against the English in
the fourteenth century and a lot more things to come.

As English began to polish itself, we entered the Modern English Period or how I prefer to
call it, Shakespeare’s language, the why I call it that is to infatuate the form in which
Shakespeare’s poems and writing were made, the style, the morpheme of it all. This is when
the language began to have the recognition that it deserve and not only for poets like him but
for its dialect, morphology, and phonology aspects which were appealing for the people. In
comparison to other times, now we saw an abundance of. Manuscript and material which
help spread the education all around the world, consequently to that of course began a
period specifically based on dialectology and was focused on a more phonological matter
than previously and we call this part of history as the Late Modern English.
 When we entered this aspect there wasn’t any effort to attempt and structure a well
organized and coherent picture of the dialect variations until the last quarter of the 19th
century. This began to be an issue when people started to think consciously about what they
were speaking, Consequently there was many dialectologist showing the local dialect and the
way in which the first systematic attempts of dialect begin to be part of the conversation.
All of these lead to the EDD which stands for English dialect dictionary and derives from the
ODD (Old English Dictionary) to be the primary help aspectos the reconstruction of the
language and what it has become today, this dictionary was created by Joseph Wright and
Elizabeth Wright.

You could wonder how did it began and how they came to the conclusion of the book itself,
and the answer is clear, they used a model which we now call Survey but not just any survey,
but SED which stands for survey of English dialects, it’s purpose was to study the traditional
dialectology of Britain and get in touch with all dialects from 313 different locations. The
material that they produced were maps demonstrating a variety of both phonological systems
and the vocabulary. This service was based on a closed group of people which were non-
mobile which means they didn’t had any contact with other dialects, Old, rural and male
based on the belief that women weren’t as educated and intelligent as men at that time
something that had them on the wrong track all along. the survey had 1200 questions for the
few male old people who took the survey and he took a lot of time for them to complete this
test out, in fact it took them from 20 to 24 hours in the administration of it. This survey of
English dialect provides us with the knowledge of a stable agricultural-based male
community born in the beginning of the 20th century.

As we go more in depth we see that some of the morphological aspects that came with it
were the pronoun system, syntax, phonology, and grammatical rules such as the construction
of its inflectional “s” throughout the present tense. also a few more changes which have
occurred in dialects over the last 200 years, and which are most apparent in the area of
phonology, can be classified into three types, standardization, leveling, and innovation.Of
course with this study came a lot of concern with the interaction of different social classes
and the the limited areas in which this test was taking place, it didn’t hurt a wider variety of
population in their studies because for first, there weren’t many males with the characteristics
they were looking for but added to that the believe of women not being able to take the test
or people that just didn’t wanted to do it.

Dialect leveling was a huge part of this too, due to the fact that it was based on the pattern
establish in the Standard English. Standard English and the urban dialects have a brotherly
relationship in which you can find differences but also resemblances, These other dialects
like welsh or Irish were first introduced in 1169 and text which proved its existence in 1250
but in Ireland which was part of this narrative was struggling to figure out between three main
languages which were English French and Irish. As a result, plantation settlements kick in
first in Lexi and Offaly later became a crucial part of the north east in Scotland.

Lest move on to North America next, where English spread in many different ways, it all
started with the colonial period which started in 1607 to 1776, they began to appropriate
words from other cultures making them their own, this words were part of what we all know
as evolution and it means the change in a good way in their culture, the diversity that they
had by influences from Spain was one of the most important ones and from 1929 to 1640
they sent 21,000 people from East Anglia to Massachusetts then they distribute the Rhode
Island Connecticut New York New Jersey and etc making this the form in which they arrived
to America from Britain Esta Anglia.
Furthermore the second migration was twice as big as the first one we previously talked about, this one
went from 1642 to 1675 and it included workers and servants arriving to Virginia although they say that
North America was the region who brought the slaves the real fact is that great Britain did it first. North
America suffered various migrations in its history, many of them were very important and as the third
migration we have a settlement of 23,000 people between 1675 and 1715, making a century jumó and
delivering in Delaware Valley. As we go further into the story the bigger afford with 250,000 immigrants
lead to Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, south in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee.
All of these migrations had a substantial amount of changes into the language including its
morphological and phonological aspect.

Then we are going to talk about the linguistic atlas of the United States and Canada which was created
and handled by Hans Kurath a linguistic and director of the ATLAS. he studied the origins of the
language in North American and how nowadays speakers can know the history of their own tongue,
this language that they call their own came from the British Empire and became to make sure lots of
languages and your features to create a homogeneous mixture, this mixture couldn’t hide the fact of its
homogenetly roots. Some of the features that the language had exchanges were the constitution of
classification of phonemes and how they worked in North America, the British visitors in North America
were very hostile and believe that English belong to them, no one was more selfish than the British so
North America created their own characteristic and subdivisions to the language. Of course there had
to be rules to organized and set of boundaries to ensure tha language staid in its place This is where
prescriptivism to place.

In this early stage of time a New Yorker activists Richard Grant White defended the idea of the
prescriptivism there was at the time, blocking ideas like neologism in the matter of innovation in words
such as “donate” or “campaign”. These had huge repercussions in the way it was spoken, it had a lot of
lexical borrowing because of this. The main provider of loan words was Spanish and they adopted a lot
of their vocabulary. I don’t like that but we have our first periods of French and Dutch loanwords and
suffixes. as you can imagine British wasn’t the only immigrants but also German, unlike those of
French, The dutch and the native Americans who competed for the lands no occupy the English
speakers in the New World.

It is also fundamental to speak about how America came to be once all of these started to happened,
with a population of 75 million people increasing to 150 million by 1950. As we said before a lot of
expressions and subdivisions were added to English to make it more adequate to North America, this is
how the dictionary of American regional English was created, it’s purpose was to treat regional words
and expressions in this play them ass part of North America’s culture it also stated some of the
mapping and geography. As time passed by DARE covered a different approach in its materials relying
on the number of igosses shared by community to create what we call as “layers”. Like we mention The
African immigration of 1619 to Virginia in a dutch ship Wes to make them slaves therefore having a
social place in Virginia this, consequently stated an African American English which developed
throughout the United States. Almost 48,000 families owned slaves in the eight states, this is how the
African American culture and dialect was born, and that’s how the regional or national standard dialect
with the African-American English and the Irish American English merged and had differences mainly
phonological.

As a whole Nother story we have Latin and English which resides in Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican and
around other parts of the United States, this variety of Latin descend resulted as having English as a
second language in some features may be supported by the containing virtuality of Spanish in Latino
communities throughout the United States. This is when we implied all the phonological variations and
accent variations English has throughout North America. The English that is spoken by a Mexican isn’t
the same as an African-American speaking it and these goes for everyone speaking it including the
British. North America till this day has no official language,
 As the third and last part of these puzzle piece, the topic takes us all over the world, when the language
officially became a well structured and established remarkable language. English langue became a lingua
franca by being a language adopted as primary language by speakers all around the world.
By the 90s there was a lot of individualism which led people to get inspired and study and publish books of
their own, it was amazing the amount of research and dedication that began to be formed around the
language consciously. It opens up the posibilites for sociolinguistic hypothesis and innovating types of
phenomenons through English research date bases.

English was, is and will be a powerful language with powerful leaders behind it, it’s history is so interesting
that by only being that it wives you the prof of why English is what it is. These Regional and world status
has a lot of background, one that we briefly explained above. Over 100 countries threat English as a
foreign language like Asia, North Africa or Latin American but we are so fascinated by it that is a privileged
to learned it and know more about it. Although is very easy to learn it has many sctuscturee, roots and
complexities to it that sometimes we forget all the thought and work people placed into it. The language in
some degree empower people to achieve more power, this is because as I said English is known for being
extremely rich and meaningful all around the world. It’s no secret that Britain’s expantion in the language is
why they are so powerful and imperative.

The technological aspect of it started with the Industrial Revolution and all the new words and knowledge
that came with it, new concepts had to be learned for the former intelligent worker to continue with the
higher level in society that it had. The English langue not only gave them power but smartness respect
from the ones around them. Some of these features that had to be upgraded were politics which handled
the First World War and all its new concepts and merging of ideas, economics which obligated scientist
and technicians to develop contests, experiments and date upgrading it to the next level, also we have all
press outlet with more than 400 daily newspapers by 1850 and all the media entertainment in general.
It’s overwhelming the amount of communication that rise to the scene with English language forms, one of
them was the motion pictures and movies, they were made in English manly by big companies like
Hollywood and all its cinematographic glory. The same thing happened with music and the art of the
language whit-in it, the beauty of rimes and poems in them made a valid point in the treasure that was
English as a hole.

English and its influences are in everything we do and say, it’s something inevitable and so what will come
on the future for the language and the world, first I believe leaning English is an experience everybody is
going to enjoy at some point, and secondly we will constantly see more words and pronunciations added
as time pasas by, it part of the perfection of any language and will be forever in constant change.
We as a global community have immediate access to technology, information and other languages in
regards to the variety of English the amount of variations that we have from English is something we have
never seen before and it will be something that will increase and expand throughout these proverbial
global village. We are standing and constantly speaking about the communication evolution of the human
being as well as all the art forms that we have created throughout the English language. I know we will
continue to develop more theories, experiments, and tools for deconstructing English and making it
blossom at its highest peak.

Andres Villalobos Sanchez