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Last Updated: Oct 12, 2024 • Article History

Global use of the English language

Global use of the English language Map showing the use of English as a first
language, as an important second language, and as an official language in
countries around the world.

Top Questions

What is the English language?

How many people speak English?

Is African American Vernacular English a dialect of English?

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English language

English languageMap showing the use of the English language as a national,

primary, or widely spoken language in countries around the world.

English language, West Germanic language of the Indo-European language

family that is closely related to the Frisian, German, and Dutch (in Belgium
called Flemish) languages. English originated in England and is the dominant
language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia,
Ireland, New Zealand, and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and
the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines,
Singapore, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.
English is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries of the
world, and it is that status that has given it the position of a global lingua
franca. It is estimated that about a third of the world’s population, some two
billion persons, now use English.

(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)

Key People: Samuel Johnson Charles Baudelaire Alexander Pope Dante

Gabriel Rossetti Sir Richard Burton

Related Topics: Middle English language Old English language British English
Austral English African English

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Origins and basic characteristics

Indo-European languages in contemporary Eurasia

Indo-European languages in contemporary EurasiaApproximate locations of

Indo-European languages in contemporary Eurasia.

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore

related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from
Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken
about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast
European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this
ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups:
East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faroese,
Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West (German, Dutch [and Flemish],
Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far
more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of
inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of
Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language
most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little
over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling
Old English in grammatical structure.
Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-
European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages
(e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During
the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified
from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and
German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The
German and Chinese words for the noun man are exemplary. German has
five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form:
ren. English stands in between, with four forms: man, man’s, men, men’s. In
English, only nouns, pronouns (as in he, him, his), adjectives (as in big,
bigger, biggest), and verbs are inflected. English is the only European
language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., the tall man, the tall
woman, compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs,
if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in
Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has only 5
forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13,
and Modern German reiten has 16.

In addition to the simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic

characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.

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Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a

consequence of the loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns
or verbs by differences in their forms are now often used as both nouns and
verbs. One can speak, for example, of planning a table or tabling a plan,
booking a place or placing a book, lifting a thumb or thumbing a lift. In the
other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian
languages, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of
separate noun and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns,
adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs
as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in
English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er
to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound,
Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no choice but to construct a
phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort. In
English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in
wages board and sports editor; or even a conjunctional group, as in prices
and incomes policy and parks and gardens committee. Any word class may
alter its function in this way: the ins and outs (prepositions becoming nouns),
no buts (conjunction becoming noun).

Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other

languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English
adopts (without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really
needed to name some new object or to denote some new process. Words
from more than 350 languages have entered English in this way. Like French,
Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical
Greek word elements. Although a Germanic language in its sounds and
grammar, the bulk of English vocabulary is in fact Romance or Classical in
origin.

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English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately

reflect the pronunciation of words; see below Orthography.

Characteristics of Modern English

Phonology

British Received Pronunciation (RP), traditionally defined as the standard

speech used in London and southeastern England, is one of many forms (or
accents) of standard speech throughout the English-speaking world. Other
pronunciations, although not standard, are often heard in the public domain.
A very small percentage of the population of England is estimated to use
“pure” RP (although the actual percentage is as unknown as what constitutes
“pure” RP). It is considered the prestige accent in such institutions as the
civil service and the BBC and, as such, has fraught associations with wealth
and privilege in Britain.

The chief differences between RP, as defined above, and a variety of

American English, such as Inland Northern (the speech form of western New
England and its derivatives, often popularly referred to as General American),
are in the pronunciation of certain individual vowels and diphthongs. Inland
Northern American vowels sometimes have semiconsonantal final glides (i.e.,
sounds resembling initial w, for example, or initial y). Aside from the final
glides, that American accent shows four divergences from British English: (1)
the words cod, box, dock, hot, and not are pronounced with a short (or half-
long) low front sound as in British bard shortened (the terms front, back, low,
and high refer to the position of the tongue); (2) words such as bud, but, cut,
and rung are pronounced with a central vowel as in the unstressed final
syllable of sofa; (3) before the fricative sounds s, f, and θ (the last of these is
the th sound in thin) the long low back vowel a, as in British bath, is
pronounced as a short front vowel a, as in British bad; (4) high back vowels
following the alveolar sounds t and d and the nasal sound n in words such as
tulips, dew, and news are pronounced without a glide as in British English;
indeed, the words sound like the British two lips, do, and nooze in snooze. (In
several American accents, however, these glides do occur.)

The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the

fricatives f, v, θ (as in thin), ð [eth] (as in then), s, z, ∫ [esh] (as in ship), Ʒ (as
in pleasure), and h; two affricatives: t∫ (as in church) and dƷ (as the j in jam);
the nasals m, n, ŋ (the sound that occurs at the end of words such as young);
the lateral l; the postalveolar or retroflex r; and the semivowels j (often
spelled y) and w. These remain fairly stable, but Inland Northern American
differs from RP in two respects: (1) r following vowels is preserved in words
such as door, flower, and harmony, whereas it is lost in RP; (2) t between
vowels is voiced, so that metal and matter sound very much like British
medal and madder, although the pronunciation of this t is softer and less
aspirated, or breathy, than the d of British English.

Like Russian, English is a strongly stressed language. Four degrees of

accentuation may be differentiated: primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak,
which may be indicated, respectively, by acute (´), circumflex (ˆ), and grave
(ˋ) accent marks and by the breve (˘). Thus, “Têll mè thĕ trúth” (the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth) may be contrasted with “Têll mé thĕ trûth”
(whatever you may tell other people); “bláck bîrd” (any bird black in colour)
may be contrasted with “bláckbìrd” (that particular bird Turdus merula). The
verbs permít and recórd (henceforth only primary stresses are marked) may
be contrasted with their corresponding nouns pérmit and récord. A feeling for
antepenultimate (third syllable from the end) primary stress, revealed in
such five-syllable words as equanímity, longitúdinal, notoríety, opportúnity,
parsimónious, pertinácity, and vegetárian, causes stress to shift when extra
syllables are added, as in histórical, a derivative of hístory and theatricálity,
a derivative of theátrical. Vowel qualities are also changed here and in such
word groups as périod, periódical, periodícity; phótograph, photógraphy,
photográphable. French stress may be sustained in many borrowed words;
e.g., bizárre, critíque, duréss, hotél, prestíge, and techníque.

Pitch, or musical tone, determined chiefly by the rate of vibration of the vocal
cords, may be level, falling, rising, or falling–rising. In counting one, two,
three, four, one naturally gives level pitch to each of these cardinal
numerals. But if people say I want two, not one, they naturally give two a
falling tone and one a falling–rising tone. In the question One? Rising pitch is
used. Word tone is called accent, and sentence tone is referred to as
intonation. The end-of-sentence cadence is important for expressing
differences in meaning. Several end-of-sentence intonations are possible, but
three are especially common: falling, rising, and falling–rising. Falling
intonation is used in completed statements, direct commands, and
sometimes in general questions unanswerable by yes or no (e.g., I have
nothing to add; keep to the right; who told you that?). Rising intonation is
frequently used in open-ended statements made with some reservation, in
polite requests, and in particular questions answerable by yes or no (e.g., I
have nothing more to say at the moment; let me know how you get on; are
you sure?). The third type of end-of-sentence intonation, first falling and then
rising pitch, is used in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts (e.g.,
some people do like them [but others do not]; don’t say I didn’t warn you
[because that is just what I’m now doing]). Intonation is on the whole less
singsong in American than in British English, and there is a narrower range of
pitch. Everywhere English is spoken, regional accents display distinctive
patterns of intonation.
Morphology

Inflection

Modern English nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are inflected.

Adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.

Most English nouns have plural inflection in (-e)s, but that form shows
variations in pronunciation in the words cats (with a final s sound), dogs (with
a final z sound), and horses (with a final iz sound), as also in the 3 rd person
singular present-tense forms of verbs: cuts (s), jogs (z), and forces (iz). Seven
nouns have mutated (umlauted) plurals: man, men; woman, women; tooth,
teeth; foot, feet; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice. Three have plurals
in -en: ox, oxen; child, children; brother, brethren. Some remain unchanged
(e.g., deer, sheep, moose, grouse). Five of the seven personal pronouns have
distinctive forms for subject and object (e.g., he/him, she/her). Adjectives
have distinctive endings for comparison (e.g., comparative bigger,
superlative biggest), with several irregular forms (e.g., good, better, best).

The forms of verbs are not complex. Only the substantive verb (to be) has
eight forms: be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Strong verbs have five
forms: ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden. Regular or weak verbs customarily
have four: walk, walks, walked, walking. Some that end in t or d have three
forms only: cut, cuts, cutting.

In addition to the above inflections, English employs two other main

morphological (structural) processes—affixation and composition—and two
subsidiary ones—back-formation and blend.

Affixation

Affixes, word elements attached to words, may either precede, as prefixes

(do, undo; way, subway), or follow, as suffixes (do, doer; way, wayward).
They may be native (overdo, waywardness), Greek (hyperbole, thesis), or
Latin (supersede, pediment). Modern technologists greatly favour the neo-
Hellenic prefixes macro-“long, large,” micro- “small,” para- “alongside,” poly-
“many,” and the Latin mini- “small,” with its antonym maxi-. The early
Internet era popularized cyber- “of computers or computer networks” and
mega- “vast.” Greek and Latin affixes have become so fully acclimatized that
they can occur together in one and the same word, as, indeed, in ac-climat-
ize-d, just used, consisting of a Latin prefix plus a Greek stem plus a Greek
suffix plus an English inflection. Suffixes are bound more closely than
prefixes to the stems or root elements of words. Consider, for instance, the
wide variety of agent suffixes in the nouns actor, artisan, dotard, engineer,
financier, hireling, magistrate, merchant, scientist, secretary, songster,
student, and worker. Suffixes may come to be attached to stems quite
fortuitously, but, once attached, they are likely to be permanent. At the same
time, one suffix can perform many functions. The suffix -er denotes the doer
of the action in the words worker, driver, and hunter; the instrument in
chopper, harvester, and roller; and the dweller in Icelander, Londoner, and
Trobriander. It refers to things or actions associated with the basic concept in
the words breather, “pause to take breath”; diner, “dining car on a train”;
and fiver, “five-pound note.” In the terms disclaimer, misnomer, and
rejoinder (all from French), the suffix denotes one single instance of the
action expressed by the verb. Usage may prove capricious. Whereas a writer
is a person, a typewriter is a machine. For some time a computer was both,
but now the word is no longer used of persons.