English language

English is the West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. this is the named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated from Anglia, a peninsula on the Baltic Sea not to be confused with East Anglia in England, to the area of Great Britain later named after them: England. The closest alive relatives of English add Scots, followed by the Low Saxon & Frisian languages. While English is genealogically West Germanic, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by Old Norman French in addition to Latin, as well as by Old Norse a North Germanic language. Speakers of English are called Anglophones.

The earliest forms of English, collectively known as plays of William Shakespeare.

Modern English has spread around the world since the 17th century as a consequence of the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States of America. Through all shape of printed and electronic media of these countries, English has become the main language of international discourse and the lingua franca in numerous regions and professionals such as lawyers and surveyors contexts such(a) as science, navigation and law. contemporary English grammar is the a object that is caused or produced by something else of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent-marking pattern, with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, and a fairly constant subject–verb–object word order. contemporary English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation.

English is the New Zealand see Anglosphere and the Republic of Ireland, and is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania. it is for a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union and numerous other world and regional international organisations. It is the near widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch. There is much variability among the many accents and dialects of English used in different countries and regions in terms of phonetics and phonology, and sometimes also vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and spelling, but it does not typically prevent understanding by speakers of other dialects and accents, although mutual unintelligibility can arise at extreme ends of the dialect continuum.

History

The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon c. year 550–1066. Old English developed from a generation of West Germanic dialects, often grouped as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic, and originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony and southern Jutland by Germanic peoples so-called to the historical record as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as the Roman economy and management collapsed. By the 7th century, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in Britain, replacing the languages of Roman Britain 43–409: Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, and Latin, brought to Britain by the Roman occupation. England and English originally and are named after the Angles.

Old English was shared into four dialects: the Anglian dialects Cædmon's Hymn, is sum in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the thorn ⟨⟩, and the modified Latin letters ash ⟨⟩.

Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is practically impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German, and its closest relative is Old Frisian. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word structure was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns he, him, his and has a few verb inflections speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken, but Old English had issue endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings.

The translation of Matthew 8:20 from 1000 shows examples of case endings nominative plural, accusative plural, genitive singular and a verb ending present plural:

Although, from the beginning, Englishmen had three manners of speaking, southern, northern and midlands speech in the middle of the country, ... Nevertheless, through intermingling and mixing, first with Danes and then with Normans, amongst many the country language has arisen, and some use strange stammering, chattering, snarling, and grating gnashing.

John of Trevisa, ca. 1385

From the 8th to the 12th century, Old English gradually transformed through language contact into Middle English. Middle English is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, but it developed further in the period from 1200 to 1450.

First, the waves of Norse colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries increase Old English into intense contact with Old Norse, a North Germanic language. Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in the Danelaw area around York, which was the centre of Norse colonisation; today these attribute are still particularly submission in Scots and Northern English. However the centre of norsified English seems to realise been in the Midlands around Lindsey, and after 920 CE when Lindsey was reincorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity, Norse attribute spread from there into English varieties that had not been in direct contact with Norse speakers. An factor of Norse influence that persists in any English varieties today is the business of pronouns beginning with th- they, them, their which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with .

With the Le Morte d'Arthur. In the Middle English period, the usage of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.

The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English 1500–1700. Early Modern English was characterised by the Great Vowel Shift 1350–1700, inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation.

The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English. It was a chain shift, meaning that regarded and returned separately. shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. Mid and open vowels were raised, and close vowels were broken into diphthongs. For example, the word bite was originally pronounced as the word beet is today, and thevowel in the word about was pronounced as the word boot is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English supports many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages.

English began to rise in prestige, relative to Norman French, during the reign of Henry V. Around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents, and a new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard, developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands. In 1476, William Caxton presentation the printing press to England and began publishing the number one printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English. Literature from the Early Modern period includes the working of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I. Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the consonant clusters /kn ɡn sw/ in knight, gnat, and sword were still pronounced. Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic equal the distinct characteristics of Early Modern English.

In the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, written in Early Modern English, Matthew 8:20 says, "The Foxes haue holes and the birds of the ayre haue nests." This exemplifies the waste of case and its effects on sentence formation replacement with subject–verb–object word order, and the use of of instead of the non-possessive genitive, and the intro of loanwords from French ayre and word replacements bird originally meaning "nestling" had replaced OE fugol.

By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. England continued to form new colonies, and these later developed their own norms for speech and writing. English was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly freelancer nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to remain using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. In the 20th century the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following theWorld War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC and other broadcasters, caused the language to spread across the planet much faster. In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.

As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standards usage were published, and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In 1755 American Dictionary of the English language to attempt to defining a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower classes dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, main to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.

In modern English, the loss of grammatical case is most prepare it is now only found in pronouns, such as he and him, she and her, who and whom, and SVO word order is mostly fixed. Some changes, such as the use of do-support, have become universalised. Earlier English did not use the word "do" as a general auxiliary as Modern English does; at first it was only used in question constructions, and even then was not obligatory. Now, do-support with the verb have is becoming increasingly standardised. The use of progressive forms in -ing, appears to be spreading to new constructions, and forms such as had been being built are becoming more common. Regularisation of irregular forms also slowly submits e.g. dreamed instead of dreamt, and analytical alternatives to inflectional forms are becoming more common e.g. more polite instead of politer. British English is also undergoing modify under the influence of American English, fuelled by the strong presence of American English in the media and the prestige associated with the US as a world power.