English language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| English | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation | /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1] | |||
| Spoken in | (see below) | |||
| Native speakers | ca. 375 million (2006)[2] Second language: 199 million – 1.4 billion[3][4] Total: 500 million – 1.8 billion[4][5] |
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| Language family | ||||
| Writing system | English alphabet (Latin script) | |||
| Official status | ||||
| Official language in | 54 countries 27 non-sovereign entities United Nations European Union Commonwealth of Nations CoE NATO NAFTA OAS OIC PIF UKUSA |
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| Regulated by | No official regulation | |||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-1 | en | |||
| ISO 639-2 | eng | |||
| ISO 639-3 | eng | |||
| Linguasphere | 52-ABA | |||
Countries
where English is an official or de facto official language, or national
language, and is spoken fluently by the majority of the population
Countries where it is an official but not primary language
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Historically, English originated from the fusion of languages and 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 (in what is now Schleswig-Holstein).[14] 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.[15] 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 superficial appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages[16][17] to what had now 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. 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, or slang terms.[18][19]
Significance
See also: English-speaking world and Anglosphere
Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca,[20][21] is the dominant language or in some instances even the required international language of communications, science, information technology, business, seafaring,[22] aviation,[23] entertainment, radio and diplomacy.[24] Its spread beyond the British Isles began with the growth of the British Empire, and by the late 19th century its reach was truly global.[4] Following British colonisation
from the 16th to 19th centuries, it became the dominant language in the
United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The growing economic
and cultural influence of the US and its status as a global superpower since World War II have significantly accelerated the language's spread across the planet.[21] English replaced German as the dominant language of science Nobel Prize laureates during the second half of the 20th century[25]. English equalled and may have surpassed French as the dominant language of diplomacy during the last half of the 19th century.A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of fields, occupations and professions such as medicine and computing; as a consequence over a billion people speak English to at least a basic level (see English language learning and teaching). It is one of six official languages of the United Nations.[26]
One impact of the growth of English is the reduction of native linguistic diversity in many parts of the world. Its influence continues to play an important role in language attrition.[27] Conversely, the natural internal variety of English along with creoles and pidgins have the potential to produce new distinct languages from English over time.[28]
History
Main article: History of the English language
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.[29] Up to that point, in Roman Britain the native population is assumed to have spoken the Celtic language Brythonic alongside the acrolectal influence of Latin, from the 400-year Roman occupation.[30]One of these incoming Germanic tribes was the Angles,[31] whom Bede believed to have relocated entirely to Britain.[32] The names 'England' (from Engla land[33] "Land of the Angles") and English (Old English Englisc[34]) are derived from the name of this tribe—but Saxons, Jutes and a range of Germanic peoples from the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland and Southern Sweden also moved to Britain in this era.[35][36][37]
Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Great Britain[38] but one of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate, and it is in this that the poem Beowulf is written.
Old English was later transformed by two waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of the North Germanic language branch when Halfdan Ragnarsson and Ivar the Boneless started the conquering and colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries (see Danelaw). The second was by speakers of the Romance language Old Norman in the 11th century with the Norman conquest of England. Norman developed into Anglo-Norman, and then Anglo-French – and introduced a layer of words especially via the courts and government. As well as extending the lexicon with Scandinavian and Norman words these two events also simplified the grammar and transformed English into a borrowing language—more than normally open to accept new words from other languages.
The linguistic shifts in English following the Norman invasion produced what is now referred to as Middle English, with Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales being the best known work.
Throughout all this period Latin in some form was the lingua franca of European intellectual life, first the Medieval Latin of the Christian Church, but later the humanist Renaissance Latin, and those that wrote or copied texts in Latin[15] commonly coined new terms from Latin to refer to things or concepts for which there was no existing native English word.
Modern English, which includes the works of William Shakespeare[39] and the King James Bible, is generally dated from about 1550, and when the United Kingdom became a colonial power, English served as the lingua franca of the colonies of the British Empire. In the post-colonial period, some of the newly created nations which had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the lingua franca to avoid the political difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. As a result of the growth of the British Empire, English was adopted in North America, India, Africa, Australia and many other regions, a trend extended with the emergence of the United States as a superpower in the mid-20th century.
Geographical distribution
Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to over a billion depending on
Countries in order of total speakers
| Country | Total | Percent of population | First language | As an additional language | Population | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States of America | 251,388,301 | 96% | 215,423,557 | 35,964,744 | 262,375,152 | Source: US Census 2000: Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000, Table 1. Figure for second language speakers are respondents who reported they do not speak English at home but know it "very well" or "well". Note: figures are for population age 5 and older | |
| India | 125,344,736 | 12% | 226,449 | 86,125,221 second language speakers. 38,993,066 third language speakers |
1,028,737,436 | Figures include both those who speak English as a second language and those who speak it as a third language. 2001 figures.[56][57] The figures include English speakers, but not English users.[58] | |
| Nigeria | 79,000,000 | 53% | 4,000,000 | >75,000,000 | 148,000,000 | Figures are for speakers of Nigerian Pidgin, an English-based pidgin or creole. Ihemere gives a range of roughly 3 to 5 million native speakers; the midpoint of the range is used in the table. Ihemere, Kelechukwu Uchechukwu. 2006. "A Basic Description and Analytic Treatment of Noun Clauses in Nigerian Pidgin." Nordic Journal of African Studies 15(3): 296–313. | |
| United Kingdom | 59,600,000 | 98% | 58,100,000 | 1,500,000 | 60,000,000 | Source: Crystal (2005), p. 109. | |
| Philippines | 48,800,000 | 58%[59] | 3,427,000[59] | 43,974,000 | 84,566,000 | Total speakers: Census 2000, text above Figure 7. 63.71% of the 66.7 million people aged 5 years or more could speak English. Native speakers: Census 1995, as quoted by Andrew González in The Language Planning Situation in the Philippines, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 19 (5&6), 487–525. (1998). Ethnologue lists 3.4 million native speakers with 52% of the population speaking it as an additional language.[59] | |
| Canada | 25,246,220 | 85% | 17,694,830 | 7,551,390 | 29,639,030 | Source: 2001 Census – Knowledge of Official Languages and Mother Tongue. The native speakers figure comprises 122,660 people with both French and English as a mother tongue, plus 17,572,170 people with English and not French as a mother tongue. | |
| Australia | 18,172,989 | 92% | 15,581,329 | 2,591,660 | 19,855,288 | Source: 2006 Census.[60] The figure shown in the first language English speakers column is actually the number of Australian residents who speak only English at home. The additional language column shows the number of other residents who claim to speak English "well" or "very well". Another 5% of residents did not state their home language or English proficiency. | |
| Note: Total = First language + Other language; Percentage = Total / Population | |||||||
Countries where English is a major language
English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guernsey, Guyana, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jamaica, Jersey, Montserrat, Nauru, New Zealand, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom and the United States.In some countries where English is not the most spoken language, it is an official language; these countries include Botswana, Cameroon, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines (Philippine English), Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Sudan, South Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Also there are countries where in a part of the territory English became a co-official language, e.g. Colombia's San Andrés y Providencia and Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. This was a result of the influence of British colonisation in the area.
It is also one of the 11 official languages that are given equal status in South Africa (South African English). English is also the official language in current dependent territories of Australia (Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and Cocos Island) and of the United States (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands,
English as a global language
See also: English in computing, International English, World language, and English as a foreign or second language
Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "world language", the lingua franca of the modern era,[21] 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.[21] It is, by international treaty, the official language for aerial and maritime communications.[64] 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.[65] Among some non-English speaking EU countries, a large percentage of the adult population claims to be able to 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.[66]
Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around the world, and
A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973)[92] that estimated the origin of English words as follows:
- Langue d'oïl, including French and Old Norman: 28.3%
- Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
- Germanic languages (including words directly inherited from Old English; does not include Germanic words coming from the Germanic element in French, Latin or other Romance languages): 25%
- Greek: 5.32%
- No etymology given: 4.03%
- Derived from proper names: 3.28%
- All other languages: less than 1%
LEGENDS
Shakespeare, William
Shakespeare was born and lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. From 1585 until 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the acting company the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about his life and prodigious literary achievements.
Shakespeare's early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication by the end of the sixteenth century. In his following phase he wrote mainly tragedies, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, Othello. The plays are often regarded as the summit of Shakespeare's art and among the greatest tragedies ever written. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognized as Shakespeare's.
Shakespeare's canon has achieved a unique standing in Western literature, amounting to a humanistic scripture. His insight in human character and motivation and his luminous, boundary-defying diction have influenced writers for centuries. Some of the more notable authors and poets so influenced are Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. According to Harold Bloom, Shakespeare "has been universally judged to be a more adequate representer of the universe of fact than anyone else, before or since."[1]
Shakespeare lived during the so-called Elizabethan Settlement in which relatively moderate English Protestantism gained ascendancy. Throughout his works he explored themes of conscience, mercy, guilt, temptation, forgiveness, and the afterlife. The poet's own religious leanings, however, are much debated. Shakespeare's universe is governed by a recognizably Christian moral order, yet threatened and often brought to grief by tragic flaws seemingly embedded in human nature much like the heroes of Greek tragedies.
He was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but Shakespeare's reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed his genius, and in the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
