British English

British English BrE or Anglo-English is a standard dialect of "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere." Variations cost in formal, or situation. English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is nearly exclusively used in parts of Scotland, North East England, Ireland, in addition to occasionally Yorkshire, whereas the adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in statement English within the United Kingdom as well as this could be pointed by the term British English. The forms of spoken English, however, alter considerably more than in almost other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more unmanageable to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford guide to World English, British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".

History

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. The resident population at this time was loosely speaking Common Brittonic—the insular style of continental Celtic, which was influenced by the Roman occupation. This business of languages Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric cohabited alongside English into the contemporary period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages, influence on English was notably limited. However, the degree of influence maintained debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations talked between English and the other West Germanic languages.

Initially, Old English was a diverse institution of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the number one was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; thewas the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree though it was never a truly mixed language in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who build a hybrid tongue for basic communication.

The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is for from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and summary English is, the more it contains Latin and French influences e.g. swine like the Germanic schwein is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork like the French porc is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans. Another example is the Anglo-Saxon 'cu' meaning cow, and the French 'bœuf' meaning beef.

Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary.