Primary
English ▢𓏺｜Definition｜1st｜20260117142009-00-⌔
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that emerged in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca.123 The language is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influence of the former British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the United States. It is the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second‑language speakers than native speakers. However, English is only the third‑most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.[
English is either the official language, or one of the official languages, of 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language in the world. In the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, it is the dominant language for historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law.4 It is a co‑official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other international and regional organisations. It has also become the de facto lingua franca of diplomacy, science, technology, international trade, logistics, tourism, aviation, entertainment, and the Internet.5 Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.4 billion speakers worldwide as of 2021.[
Old English emerged from a group of West Germanic dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Early inscriptions were written with runes before a Latin‑based alphabet was adopted for longer texts. Late Old English borrowed some grammar and core vocabulary from Old Norse, a North Germanic language.678 An evolution of the Latin alphabet, the English alphabet, fully supplanted the runic alphabet by the High Middle Ages, coinciding with the emergence of Middle English in England under Norman control. Middle English borrowed vocabulary extensively from French dialects, which are the source of approximately 28 per cent of Modern English words, and from Latin, which is the source of an additional 28 per cent.9 While Latin and the Romance languages are thus the source for a majority of its lexicon taken as a whole, English’s grammar and phonology remain Germanic, as does most of its basic everyday vocabulary. Finally, Middle English transformed, in part through the Great Vowel Shift, into Modern English, which exists on a dialect continuum with Scots; it is next most closely related to Low Saxon and Frisian.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
The Routes of English. ↩
Crystal 2003a, p. 6. ↩
Wardhaugh 2010, p. 55. ↩
Crystal 2003b, pp. 108–109. ↩
Chua, Amy (18 January 2022). “How the English Language Conquered the World”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 1 March 2022. ↩
Finkenstaedt, Thomas; Dieter Wolff (1973). Ordered profusion; studies in dictionaries and the English lexicon. C. Winter. ISBN 978-3-533-02253-4. ↩
Bammesberger 1992, p. 30. ↩
Svartvik & Leech 2006, p. 39. ↩
Burnley, David (1992). “Lexis and Semantics”. In Blake, Norman (ed.). The Cambridge History of the English Language. pp. 409–499. doi:10.1017/chol9780521264754.006. ISBN 978-1-139-05553-6. Latin and French each account for a little more than 28 percent of the lexis recorded in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Finkenstaedt & Wolff 1973) ↩
Secondary
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