English

Welcome

English belongs to the Western group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is most closely related to Low German dialects in northern Germany and to Dutch, sharing with them the absence of the Second Sound Shift which occurred around 600 AD.

English is descended from the language spoken in the English Isles by the Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who came to the British Isles around 450 AD and drove the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants to areas that are now Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by these invaders formed the basis of Old English, which was also strongly influenced by Old Norse, spoken by the Viking invaders of the 8th-9th centuries.

For the 300 years after the Norman Conquest in 1066, the kings of England spoke only French. During this time, a large number of French words were assimilated into Old English, which also lost most of its inflections. The resulting language is known as Middle English. The most famous surviving work from Old and Middle English are Beowulf and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Around 1500, the Great Vowel Shift marked the transition from Middle English to Modern English.

According to Ethnologue, English has 341 million native speakers, which makes it the third- or fourth-largest native language in the world after Mandarin Chinese (874 million), Hindi (366 million), and Spanish (between 322 and 358 million). Some estimates (Global Reach) put the number of native speakers of English at over 500 million, but there is no reliable way to verify the number. Estimates of the number of second-language speakers of English vary widely as well, from 500 million to 1 billion.

English has a wider dispersion than any other language in the world, due to the political, economic, scientific, and cultural influence first of England and later of the United States. Countries using English as either a first or a second language are located on all five continents, and the total population of these countries amounts to close to half of the world's population. It is the official or national language of 52 countries, among them U.K. and Commonwealth Countries, and the U.S. and its territories.

English enjoys a dominant Internet presence, accounting for 35.8% of the world's online population, as estimated by Global Reach.

English is now the most widely studied second language in the world because a working knowledge of English is required in many fields and occupations as well as for international communication. English loanwords now appear in many languages, especially in the fields of technology and culture, and international terminology is dominated by English words.

Select from the languages below:
Egyptian Arabic	Modern Standard Arabic	Cantonese
Croatian	Czech	Danish
Dutch	English	Finnish
German	Greek	Hindi
Icelandic	Italian	Japanese
Korean	Mandarin	Polish
Portuguese	Russian	Spanish
Swedish	Turkish	Hebrew
Ukrainian	Welsh