English

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Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

West Germanic language which has approx. 325 million native speakers, in England (56 million), the United States (232 million), Canada (24 million), and Australia and New Zealand (17 million). It is the sole official language in more than two dozen countries (e.g. South Africa), and is used as a language of commerce in India and Pakistan. Today it is the most important language of commerce and the most widely learned second language. The name ‘English’ comes from the Angles, who together with other tribes (Saxons, Jutes) conquered Britain in the fifth century AD and forced the native Celts ( Celtic) into remote areas (Scotland, Wales, Cornwall). Three main periods in the history of English can be distinguished. (a) Old English (fifth century to 1050), with the dialect of Wessex as the ‘standard language.’ (b) Middle English (1050–1500): during the Norman occupation of England (from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 to the mid fourteenth century England was bilingual English-French). The effects of Norman French are seen especially in the vocabulary, where distinctions between words with similar meanings often rest on coexisting Germanic and Romance roots: e.g. freedom (Gmc.) vs liberty (Rom.). While Old English was an inflectional language with grammatical gender for substantives (masculine, feminine, neuter), four cases, and strong and weak adjectival declension, this structure was simplified as the loss of final syllables increasingly led to the loss of grammatical gender, the simplification of plural formation, and the widespread loss of inflectional morphemes. (c) Modern English, as a result, is virtually without inflection; grammatical relations which were formerly marked morphologically are now expressed by firm word order rules (subject-verb-object). Current orthography of English, with its wide discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation, represents the sound inventory of the late Middle English period at the end of the fifteenth century (cf. the various pronunciations of ‹ou› in through, thousand, thought, though, tough, cough, could).

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Anglia.

English Studies.

English Today.

English World-Wide.

dialect

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