The English language.

 

The English language belongs to the Indio-European family of languages (sometimes called Aryan, or Indo-Germanic), which also includes Sanskrit (the classical language of India) and the various languages derived from it (Prakrit, Pali, Hindustani, etc), Old and Modern Persian, Classical and Modern Greek, Latin and its descendants (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian), Old Celtic (whit its modern derivations: Irish Erse, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh Cymric), Old Slavonic (from which Russian, Serbian, Polish, Czech and Bulgarian are derived), Baltic (including Lithuanian and Lettish), Albanian and other languages.

English is one of the tongues included in the Germanic group of Indo-European, together with Gothic (which represents East Germanic), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic (which are the North Germanic or Scandinavian tongues), and the languages of the West Germanic group: Old High German (which has developed into Modern German) and Low German (from which derive Old Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, and English itself).

English is spoken today as first language by nearly 308 million people (of which 233 in America and 58 in Europe), and is the language with the greatest international diffusion throughout the world.

 

English as a global language.

Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "world language", the lingua franca of the modern era, and while it is not an official language in most countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language. Some linguists believe that it is no longer the exclusive cultural property of "native English speakers", but is rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it continues to grow. It is, by international treaty, the official language for aerial and maritime communications. English is an official language of the United Nations and many other international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee.

English is the language most often studied as a foreign language in the European Union, by 89% of schoolchildren, ahead of French at 32%, while the perception of the usefulness of foreign languages amongst Europeans is 68% in favour of English ahead of 25% for French. Among some non-English speaking EU countries, a large percentage of the adult population can converse in English — in particular: 85% in Sweden, 83% in Denmark, 79% in the Netherlands, 66% in Luxembourg and over 50% in Finland, Slovenia, Austria, Belgium, and Germany.

Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around the world, and English is the most commonly used language in the sciences with Science Citation Index reporting as early as 1997 that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries.

This increasing use of the English language globally has had a large impact on many other languages, leading to language shift and even language death, and to claims of linguistic imperialism. English itself is now open to language shift as multiple regional varieties feed back into the language as a whole. For this reason, the "English language is forever evolving".

 

 

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What are the origins of the English Language?

The history of English is conventionally, if perhaps too neatly, divided into three periods usually called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and Modern English. The earliest period begins with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century A.D., though no records of their language survive from before the seventh century, and it continues until the end of the eleventh century or a bit later. By that time Latin, Old Norse (the language of the Viking invaders), and especially the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant class after the Norman Conquest in 1066 had begun to have a substantial impact on the lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional system that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to break down.

 

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