English is a West Germanic language
spoken originally in England, and is now the most widely used language
in the world. It is spoken as a first language by a majority of the
inhabitants of several nations, including the United Kingdom, the United
States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.
It is the third most common native
language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. It is widely
learned as a second language and is an official language of the European
Union, many Commonwealth countries and the United Nations, as well as
in many world organisations.
English arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
of England and what is now south-east Scotland, but was then under the
control of the kingdom of Northumbria.
Following the extensive influence of
Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, via the
British Empire, and of the United States since the mid-20th century, it
has been widely propagated around the world, becoming the leading
language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many
regions.
Historically, English originated from the
fusion of closely related dialects, now collectively termed Old
English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by
Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) settlers by the 5th century – with the word
English being derived from the name of the Angles, and ultimately from
their ancestral region of Angeln.
A significant number of English words are
constructed based on roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was
the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual
life. The language was further influenced by the Old Norse language due
to Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries.
The Norman conquest of England in the
11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman-French, and
vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the appearance of a
close relationship with Romance languages to what had then become Middle
English.
The Great Vowel Shift that began in the
south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events
that mark the emergence of Modern English from Middle English.
Owing to the assimilation of words from
many other languages throughout history, modern English contains a very
large vocabulary, with complex and irregular spelling, particularly of
vowels.
Modern English has not only assimilated
words from other European languages but also from all over the world,
including words of Hindi and African origin.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words, not including many technical, scientific, and slang terms.
