In GA, these vowels merge to three /æ ɑ ɔ/,[170] and in Canadian English, they merge to two /æ ɑ/. [243], Readers of English can generally rely on the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation to be fairly regular for letters or digraphs used to spell consonant sounds. Dutch is spoken by over 20 million people, and is more distant from English. Australian English grammar aligns closely to British and American English; like American English, collective plural subjects take on a singular verb (as in the government is rather than are). Some adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, with the positive degree unmarked, the suffix -er marking the comparative, and -est marking the superlative: a small boy, the boy is smaller than the girl, that boy is the smallest. English is a West Germanic language that started in Anglo-Saxon England.It is originally from Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from Jutland and the Rhine Valley in the Early Middle Ages.It now has the status of a global lingua franca since it being used by traders and from the British Empire's colonies. ; grammatical rules require Do you know him? The great majority of literary works in Old English that survive to today are written in the Roman alphabet. GA is a rhotic dialect, meaning that it pronounces /r/ at the end of a syllable, but RP is non-rhotic, meaning that it loses /r/ in that position. Why Literary Studies? In GA, vowel length is non-distinctive. English literature has many famous stories and plays. Today, American accent variation is often increasing at the regional level and decreasing at the very local level,[263] though most Americans still speak within a phonological continuum of similar accents,[264] known collectively as General American (GA), with differences hardly noticed even among Americans themselves (such as Midland and Western American English). Clusters of obstruents always agree in voicing, and clusters of sibilants and of plosives with the same point of articulation are prohibited. [100] The majority of immigrants to the United States without British ancestry rapidly adopted English after arrival. Written English uses a strange spelling. ", "L'incroyable histoire des mots français dans la langue anglaise", "The Roles of Singapore Standard English and Singlish", "What are some commonly misspelled English words? [83], Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. Now the majority of the United States population are monolingual English speakers,[68][101] and English has been given official or co-official status by 30 of the 50 state governments, as well as all five territorial governments of the US, though there has never been an official language at the federal level. Varieties of English learned by non-native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. [237] Further complications have arisen through sound changes with which the orthography has not kept pace. In clauses with auxiliary verbs, they are the finite verbs and the main verb is treated as a subordinate clause. [204], In English a sentence may be composed of one or more clauses, that may, in turn, be composed of one or more phrases (e.g. Modern Irish English, however, has its roots in English colonisation in the 17th century. Irish Gaelic is spoken by very few people today. [256][257][258] Traits that have spread from London in recent decades include the use of intrusive R (drawing is pronounced drawring /ˈdrɔːrɪŋ/), t-glottalisation (Potter is pronounced with a glottal stop as Po'er /poʔʌ/), and the pronunciation of th- as /f/ (thanks pronounced fanks) or /v/ (bother pronounced bover). bay and boat pronounced [bʲeː] and [bʷoːt]). The noun must agree with the number of the determiner, e.g. For example, the word bite was originally pronounced as the word beet is today, and the second vowel in the word about was pronounced as the word boot is today. Also, expressions and typical short phrases are often of Germanic origin. Most English speakers around the world can understand radio programmes, television programmes, and films from many parts of the English-speaking world. Stress in English is phonemic, and some pairs of words are distinguished by stress. Australian English also has a contrast between long and short vowels, not found in most other varieties. An infinitive form, that uses the plain form of the verb and the preposition to, is used for verbal clauses that are syntactically subordinate to a finite verbal clause. [76], In the three-circles model, countries such as Poland, China, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries where English is taught as a foreign language, make up the "expanding circle". [117] English is, by international treaty, the basis for the required controlled natural languages[118] Seaspeak and Airspeak, used as international languages of seafaring[119] and aviation. Vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened as well, and vowel shortening causes changes in vowel quality: vowel reduction. They are called the North Germanic languages. Meanings and definitions of words with pronunciations and translations. [242] Standard English spelling is based on a graphomorphemic segmentation of words into written clues of what meaningful units make up each word. (See § Dialects, accents, and varieties, below. [284][285][286], The development of Singapore English started from at least 1819 when British statesman Stamford Raffles arrived in the lands that now make up Singapore to establish a trading port. [150][151] Some dialects do not contrast /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unstressed positions, so that rabbit and abbot rhyme and Lenin and Lennon are homophonous, a dialect feature called weak vowel merger. English is most closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, while its vocabulary has been significantly influenced by other Germanic languages, particularly Old Norse (a North Germanic language), as well as Latin and French. [51][3] England continued to form new colonies, and these later developed their own norms for speech and writing. 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. [297], Several varieties of English are also spoken in the Caribbean islands that were colonial possessions of Britain, including Jamaica, and the Leeward and Windward Islands and Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Cayman Islands, and Belize. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes. We have qualifications for schools, general and higher education, and business. In RP, vowel length is phonemic; long vowels are marked with a triangular colon ⟨ː⟩ in the table above, such as the vowel of need [niːd] as opposed to bid [bɪd]. that is exactly what I mean where that refers to some fact known to both interlocutors, or then used to locate the time of a narrated event relative to the time of a previously narrated event). The subordinating conjunction that shows that the clause that follows is a subordinate clause, but it is often omitted. The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into the two extremely general categories of British English (BrE) and North American English (NAE). Stressed syllables are pronounced longer and louder than unstressed syllables, and vowels in unstressed syllables are frequently reduced while vowels in stressed syllables are not. it was the girl that the bee stung, there was a girl who was stung by a bee. Other adjectives have comparatives formed by periphrastic constructions, with the adverb more marking the comparative, and most marking the superlative: happier or more happy, the happiest or most happy. English forms new words from existing words or roots in its vocabulary through a variety of processes. [145] GA has dark l in most cases. Relative clauses can be introduced by the pronouns who, whose, whom and which as well as by that (which can also be omitted. Canadian English, except for the Atlantic provinces and perhaps Quebec, may be classified under GA as well, but it often shows the raising of the vowels /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ before voiceless consonants, as well as distinct norms for written and pronunciation standards. Fortis stops such as /p/ have additional articulatory or acoustic features in most dialects: they are aspirated [pʰ] when they occur alone at the beginning of a stressed syllable, often unaspirated in other cases, and often unreleased [p̚] or pre-glottalised [ʔp] at the end of a syllable. There is one count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words—but that count presumably includes words such as Latin species names, scientific terminology, botanical terms, prefixed and suffixed words, jargon, foreign words of extremely limited English use, and technical acronyms. [289], The first significant exposure of the Philippines to the English language occurred in 1762 when the British occupied Manila during the Seven Years' War, but this was a brief episode that had no lasting influence. Although the great influence of these languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed language. The subjective case corresponds to the Old English nominative case, and the objective case is used both in the sense of the previous accusative case (in the role of patient, or direct object of a transitive verb), and in the sense of the Old English dative case (in the role of a recipient or indirect object of a transitive verb). It has since evolved considerably. (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. Everything is free and no sign-up is required. [56][57] In the countries of the EU, English is the most widely spoken foreign language in nineteen of the twenty-five member states where it is not an official language (that is, the countries other than Ireland and Malta). Whether you need English for a job, a visa, or a vacation, English Marketplace makes learning easy. [20], Like Icelandic and Faroese, the development of English in the British Isles isolated it from the continental Germanic languages and influences. The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English (1500–1700). Formation of new words, called neologisms, based on Greek and/or Latin roots (for example television or optometry) is a highly productive process in English and in most modern European languages, so much so that it is often difficult to determine in which language a neologism originated. The single letter x is generally pronounced as /z/ in word-initial position and as /ks/ otherwise. ", "Singlish Guide: 125 Phrases/Words That Define SG (Singaporean English)", "Variation in Nonnative Varieties of English", "Chapter 17: English phonology and morphology", Second Report submitted by the United Kingdom pursuant to article 25, paragraph 1 of the framework convention for the protection of national minorities, Special Eurobarometer 386: Europeans and Their Languages, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, "IMO Standard Marine Communication Phrases", "Census 2011: Key Statistics for Northern Ireland December 2012", "Language Policy in Multilingual Educational Contexts", "Language Use in the United States: 2011", "Population by mother tongue and age groups (total), 2011 counts, for Canada, provinces and territories", "2013 QuickStats About Culture and Identity", "Population by first language spoken and province", "English in the Present Day (Since ca. [67], Countries with large communities of native speakers of English (the inner circle) include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English. Through the use of these complex sentence constructions with informationally vacuous subjects, English is able to maintain both a topic-comment sentence structure and a SVO syntax. To whose house did you go last night?. Fortis obstruents, such as /p tʃ s/ are pronounced with more muscular tension and breath force than lenis consonants, such as /b dʒ z/, and are always voiceless. [203] The example below demonstrates this double marking in a sentence where both object and subject are represented with a third person singular masculine pronoun: Indirect objects (IO) of ditransitive verbs can be placed either as the first object in a double object construction (S V IO O), such as I gave Jane the book or in a prepositional phrase, such as I gave the book to Jane. A deictic pronoun points to some person or object by identifying it relative to the speech situation—for example, the pronoun I identifies the speaker, and the pronoun you, the addressee. Modern English syntax language is moderately analytic. Auxiliary verbs form main clauses, and the main verbs function as heads of a subordinate clause of the auxiliary verb. 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 features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English. While few scholars agree with Chomsky and Halle (1968) that conventional English orthography is "near-optimal",[237] there is a rationale for current English spelling patterns. ", "Duration, vowel quality, and the rhythmic pattern of English", "How many words are there in the English language? The pronunciation of particular areas distinguishes dialects as separate regional accents. The first-person present-tense form is am, the third person singular form is is, and the form are is used in the second-person singular and all three plurals. Middle English literature includes Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Because the United Kingdom (the country where England is) and the United States have historically been powerful in commerce and government, many people find it helpful to learn English to communicate in science, business, and diplomacy. [107], As decolonisation proceeded throughout the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, former colonies often did not reject English but rather continued to use it as independent countries setting their own language policies. Later, many short stories and novels also used English. English word order has moved from the Germanic verb-second (V2) word order to being almost exclusively subject–verb–object (SVO). About 220 million others use it as their second language. For example, in the question What did you see?, the word what appears as the first constituent despite being the grammatical object of the sentence. In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.[46]. English is a West Germanic language that started in Anglo-Saxon England. Use the above search field to enter the word you would like to have translated from English to Swahili. The reflexive pronouns are used when the oblique argument is identical to the subject of a phrase (e.g. First, the waves of Norse colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English into intense contact with Old Norse, a North Germanic language. [18] Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other Anglic languages, including Scots[19] and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy (Yola) dialects of Ireland. [248], English writing also includes a system of punctuation marks that is similar to those used in most alphabetic languages around the world. [citation needed] A similar code-switching method is used by urban native speakers of Visayan languages called Bislish. [35] The modern English alphabet contains 26 letters of the Latin script: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z (which also have capital forms: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z). [121] It achieved parity with French as a language of diplomacy at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919. [26][27] From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as the Roman economy and administration collapsed. Since the ninth century, English has been written in a Latin alphabet (also called Roman alphabet). These situations have prompted proposals for spelling reform in English. [178] Noun phrases can be short, such as the man, composed only of a determiner and a noun. [177], Possession can be expressed either by the possessive enclitic -s (also traditionally called a genitive suffix), or by the preposition of. The classic example is the loss of case in grammar. An example of this is H-dropping, which was historically a feature of lower-class London English, particularly Cockney, and can now be heard in the local accents of most parts of England—yet it remains largely absent in broadcasting and among the upper crust of British society. Questions are marked by do-support, wh-movement (fronting of question words beginning with wh-) and word order inversion with some verbs. [160], In terms of rhythm, English is generally described as a stress-timed language, meaning that the amount of time between stressed syllables tends to be equal. Stress is also used to distinguish between words and phrases, so that a compound word receives a single stress unit, but the corresponding phrase has two: e.g. English definition: English means belonging or relating to England, or to its people, language, or culture .... | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and examples Some dialects have introduced innovative 2nd person plural pronouns such as y'all found in Southern American English and African American (Vernacular) English or youse found in Australian English and ye in Hiberno-English. [289] Singaporean accents can also be said to be largely non-rhotic. Stress is a combination of duration, intensity, vowel quality, and sometimes changes in pitch. Different words can use the same letters and combinations for very different sounds. [146], All sonorants (liquids /l, r/ and nasals /m, n, ŋ/) devoice when following a voiceless obstruent, and they are syllabic when following a consonant at the end of a word. changing the vowel of the stem, as in the pairs speak/spoke and foot/feet) and weak stems inflected through affixation (such as love/loved, hand/hands). In Australia, Canada, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and the United States, among others (like those in the Commonwealth of Nations), English is the main language. All these languages belong to the same West Germanic family as English. His English is Early Modern English, and not quite like what people speak or write today. [citation needed], English is spoken widely in southern Africa and is an official or co-official language in several countries. English borrowed many words from Norman at that time, and also began to drop the old word endings. Most standard varieties are affected by the Great Vowel Shift, which changed the pronunciation of long vowels, but a few dialects have slightly different results. [3][4][5] It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the area of Great Britain that later took their name, England. The spread of Cockney features across the south-east led the media to talk of Estuary English as a new dialect, but the notion was criticised by many linguists on the grounds that London had been influencing neighbouring regions throughout history. Have fun learning grammar, writing, vocabulary, reference skills and more. Another productive word-formation process is nominal compounding,[218][220] producing compound words such as babysitter or ice cream or homesick. [196], Further aspectual distinctions are encoded by the use of auxiliary verbs, primarily have and be, which encode the contrast between a perfect and non-perfect past tense (I have run vs. It originated in England and is the dominant language of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. [176], Most count nouns are inflected for plural number through the use of the plural suffix -s, but a few nouns have irregular plural forms. [47] Compared to European languages for which official organisations have promoted spelling reforms, English has spelling that is a less consistent indicator of pronunciation, and standard spellings of words that are more difficult to guess from knowing how a word is pronounced. [21], Unlike Icelandic and Faroese, which were isolated, the development of English was influenced by a long series of invasions of the British Isles by other peoples and languages, particularly Old Norse and Norman French. The personal interrogative pronoun who is the only interrogative pronoun to still show inflection for case, with the variant whom serving as the objective case form, although this form may be going out of use in many contexts.[211]. [66] In his model, Kachru bases his model on the history of how English spread in different countries, how users acquire English, and the range of uses English has in each country. Moreover, the vast majority of these people aren’t native English speakers. dreamed instead of dreamt), and analytical alternatives to inflectional forms are becoming more common (e.g. "Scots" is a dialect of English (although some call it a separate language). [240] Moreover, standard English spelling shows etymological relationships between related words that would be obscured by a closer correspondence between pronunciation and spelling, for example the words photograph, photography, and photographic,[240] or the words electricity and electrical. [269], In Southern American English, the most populous American "accent group" outside of GA,[270] rhoticity now strongly prevails, replacing the region's historical non-rhotic prestige. Some scholars have argued that English can be considered a mixed language or a creole—a theory called the Middle English creole hypothesis. without the third person singular -s), for use in subordinate clauses (e.g. Nupedia's articles were written and owned by Bomis, Inc which was a web portal company. [154] Clusters of nasal and stop are only allowed in codas. 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 case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings.[37][38][39]. [194] Futurity of action is expressed periphrastically with one of the auxiliary verbs will or shall. 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. It is also the main languages ​​in Australia and New Zealand and is widely spoken in parts of the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia. Modern English has been spreading around the world since the 17th century by the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States. By the 12th century Middle English was fully developed, integrating both Norse and French features; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early Modern English around 1500. The history of the British Empire has added to the spread of English. English is a West Germanic language first spoken in early medieval England, which eventually became the leading language of international discourse in the 21st century. [190] Prepositions have a wide range of uses in English. The style of English is that meaning is made clear more by context and syntax. [259], Scots is today considered a separate language from English, but it has its origins in early Northern Middle English[260] and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, particularly Scots Gaelic and Old Norse. [226] Linguist Anthony Lacoudre estimated that over 40,000 English words are of French origin and may be understood without orthographical change by French speakers. While English is a subject-prominent language, at the discourse level it tends to use a topic-comment structure, where the known information (topic) precedes the new information (comment). Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England; this was a period in which English was influenced by Old French, in particular through its Old Norman dialect. [116][117] English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. [99], The settlement history of the English-speaking inner circle countries outside Britain helped level dialect distinctions and produce koineised forms of English in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. pronouncing the word "press" almost like "pray-us"),[275] the pin–pen merger, and other distinctive phonological, grammatical, and lexical features, many of which are actually recent developments of the 19th century or later. Here are some grade-based English worksheets for kids to get the learning started! Historically the -s possessive has been used for animate nouns, whereas the of possessive has been reserved for inanimate nouns. [9][10] Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London, the printing of the King James Bible and the start of the Great Vowel Shift.[11]. Early studies of English vocabulary by lexicographers, the scholars who formally study vocabulary, compile dictionaries, or both, were impeded by a lack of comprehensive data on actual vocabulary in use from good-quality linguistic corpora,[219] collections of actual written texts and spoken passages. [221] A process more common in Old English than in Modern English, but still productive in Modern English, is the use of derivational suffixes (-hood, -ness, -ing, -ility) to derive new words from existing words (especially those of Germanic origin) or stems (especially for words of Latin or Greek origin). [28][29][30] England and English (originally Ænglaland and Ænglisc) are named after the Angles. 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): From the 8th to the 12th century, Old English gradually transformed through language contact into Middle English. Google's free service instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. ), GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, co-official language of the United Nations, Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic) languages, Phonological history of Old English § Palatalization, the Roman economy and administration collapsed, American Dictionary of the English language, List of territorial entities where English is an official language, Geographical distribution of English speakers, List of countries by English-speaking population, people who share no native language meet anywhere in the world, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Lists of English loanwords by country or language of origin, spelling differences between British and American English, "How English evolved into a global language", Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race – A Study of the Settlement of England and the Tribal Origin of the Old English People, How English evolved into a global language 2010, "Which countries are best at English as a second language?

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