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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
English
Pronunciation /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]
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]
L2: 1.077 billion (2021)[3]
Total: 1.457 billion
Language family
Indo-European
Germanic
West Germanic
North Sea Germanic
Anglic
English
Early forms
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Germanic
Old English
Middle English
Early Modern English
Writing system
Latin (English alphabet)
Anglo-Saxon runes (historical)
English Braille, Unified English Braille
Signed forms Manually coded English (multiple systems)
Official status
Official language in
57 countries

31 non-sovereign entities

Working language

Various organisations
Language codes
ISO 639-1 en
ISO 639-2 eng
ISO 639-3 eng
Glottolog stan1293
Linguasphere 52-ABA

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.
Part of a series on the
English language
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List of dialects of English
Teaching
Teaching English as a second language
vte
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.[4][5][6] 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;[8] 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 57

sovereign states (such as India, Ireland, and Canada). In the United Kingdom, the
United States, Australia, and New Zealand, it is the sole or dominant language for
historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law.[9] 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.[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][12][13] 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.

Classification

Anglic languages
English
Scots
within the North Sea Germanic languages, which also include
Frisian (West, North, Saterland);
Low German/Saxon;
within the West Germanic languages, which also include
Dutch in Europe and Afrikaans in Africa
......German (High):
Central; in Lux.: Luxembourgish
Upper
...... Yiddish
English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the
Germanic languages.[15] Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and
linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, whose languages gradually
evolved into the Anglic languages in the British Isles, and into the Frisian
languages and Low German/Low Saxon on the continent.[16] Traditionally, the Frisian
languages were thought to be closer to English than other languages in the West
Germanic family, but most modern scholars no longer consider this to be a valid
characterisation of the relationship.[17] Although both of these languages shared
certain sound changes that did not affect other closely related languages around
the North Sea at the time, these sound changes were not simultaneous and thus do
not reflect a unique phylogenetic relationship.[18][19] Instead, it is likely that
the three Ingvaeonic languages—English, Frisian, and Low German—share one common
ancestor which acted as a dialect continuum along the North Sea coast, later
splitting off into the three languages during the Migration Period, around the 5th
century.[16] Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into
Modern English.[20] Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed
into a number of other Anglic languages, including Scots[21] and the extinct
Fingallian and Yola dialects of Ireland.[22]

Like Icelandic and Faroese, the development of English in the British Isles
isolated it from the continental Germanic languages and their influences, and it
has since diverged considerably. English is not mutually intelligible with any
continental Germanic language, as it differs in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology.
However, some of these, such as Dutch and Frisian, do show strong affinities with
English, especially with its earlier stages.[23][page needed]

Because of a long series of foreign invasions of the British Isles, English was
influenced by various languages, especially Old Norse and French dialects, in
contrast to Icelandic and Faroese, which remained isolated. These left a profound
mark of their own on the language, so that English shows some similarities in
vocabulary and grammar with many languages outside its linguistic clades—but it is
not mutually intelligible with any of those languages either. Some scholars have
argued that English can be considered a mixed language or a creole—a theory called
the Middle English creole hypothesis. Although the great influence of these
languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged,
most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed
language.[24][25]

English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with

other Germanic languages including Dutch, German, and Swedish.[26] These shared
innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor
called Proto-Germanic. Some shared features of Germanic languages include the
division of verbs into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs, and the
sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants, known as Grimm's and
Verner's laws. English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian
and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that
were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic (see Phonological history of Old English §
Palatalization).[27]