English Language - Britannica Online Encyclopedia

English language -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 8/21/23, 6:36 PM
English language
English
TABLE OF CONTENTS
language,
West Introduction
Germanic
Origins and basic characteristics
language of
Characteristics of Modern English
global use of the English the Indo-
Historical background
language European
Varieties of English
language
family that
is closely
related to the Frisian, German, and Dutch (in Belgium
called Flemish) languages. English originated in
England and is the dominant language of the United
English language
States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia,
Ireland, New Zealand, and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific
Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, Singapore, and many
countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. English is the first choice of
foreign language in most other countries of the world, and it is that status that has given it
the position of a global lingua franca. It is estimated that about a third of the world’s
population, some two billion persons, now use English.
(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)
Origins and basic characteristics

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most
other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent
tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed
to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups
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descended from this ancestral speech, is usually

divided by scholars into three regional groups: East
(Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North
(Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and
Danish), and West (German, Dutch [and Flemish],
Indo-European languages in Frisian, and English). Though closely related to
contemporary Eurasia English, German remains far more conservative than
English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of
inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the
islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern
English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living
language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.
Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the

ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French,
Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years,
English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and
Vietnamese. The German and Chinese words for the noun man are exemplary. German has
five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form: ren. English
stands in between, with four forms: man, man’s, men, men’s. In English, only nouns,
pronouns (as in he, him, his), adjectives (as in big, bigger, biggest), and verbs are inflected.
English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., the tall man,
the tall woman, compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the
Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and
Modern German, it will be found that English now has only 5 forms (ride, rides, rode,
riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16.
In addition to the simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics:
flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.
Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of
inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms
are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of planning a
table or tabling a plan, booking a place or placing a book, lifting a thumb or thumbing a
lift. In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian
languages, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun
and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can
also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs
as adjectives. One speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must
add the suffix -er to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound,
Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the
use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to
employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in wages board and sports editor; or even a
conjunctional group, as in prices and incomes policy and parks and gardens committee.
Any word class may alter its function in this way: the ins and outs (prepositions becoming
nouns), no buts (conjunction becoming noun).
Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the
ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts
(with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some
new process. Words from more than 350 languages have entered English in this way. Like
French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical
Greek word elements. Although a Germanic language in its sounds and grammar, the bulk
of English vocabulary is in fact Romance or Classical in origin.
English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the
pronunciation of words; see below Orthography.
Characteristics of Modern English

Phonology
British Received Pronunciation (RP), traditionally defined as the standard speech used in
London and southeastern England, is one of many forms (or accents) of standard speech
throughout the English-speaking world. Other pronunciations, although not standard, are
often heard in the public domain. A very small percentage of the population of England is
estimated to use “pure” RP (although the actual percentage is as unknown as what
constitutes “pure” RP). It is considered the prestige accent in such institutions as the civil
service and the BBC and, as such, has fraught associations with wealth and privilege in
Britain.
The chief differences between RP, as defined above, and a variety of American English,
such as Inland Northern (the speech form of western New England and its derivatives, often
popularly referred to as General American), are in the pronunciation of certain individual
vowels and diphthongs. Inland Northern American vowels sometimes have
semiconsonantal final glides (i.e., sounds resembling initial w, for example, or initial y).
Aside from the final glides, that American accent shows four divergences from British
English: (1) the words cod, box, dock, hot, and not are pronounced with a short (or half-
long) low front sound as in British bard shortened (the terms front, back, low, and high refer
to the position of the tongue); (2) words such as bud, but, cut, and rung are pronounced
with a central vowel as in the unstressed final syllable of sofa; (3) before the fricative
sounds s, f, and θ (the last of these is the th sound in thin) the long low back vowel a, as in
British bath, is pronounced as a short front vowel a, as in British bad; (4) high back vowels
following the alveolar sounds t and d and the nasal sound n in words such as tulips, dew,
and news are pronounced without a glide as in British English; indeed, the words sound like
the British two lips, do, and nooze in snooze. (In several American accents, however, these
glides do occur.)
The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, θ

(as in thin), ð [eth] (as in then), s, z, ∫ [esh] (as in ship), Ʒ (as in pleasure), and h; two
affricatives: t∫ (as in church) and dƷ (as the j in jam); the nasals m, n, ŋ (the sound that
occurs at the end of words such as young); the lateral l; the postalveolar or retroflex r; and
the semivowels j (often spelled y) and w. These remain fairly stable, but Inland Northern
American differs from RP in two respects: (1) r following vowels is preserved in words
such as door, flower, and harmony, whereas it is lost in RP; (2) t between vowels is voiced,
so that metal and matter sound very much like British medal and madder, although the
pronunciation of this t is softer and less aspirated, or breathy, than the d of British English.
Like Russian, English is a strongly stressed language. Four degrees of accentuation may be
differentiated: primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak, which may be indicated, respectively,
by acute (´), circumflex (ˆ), and grave (ˋ) accent marks and by the breve (˘). Thus, “Têll mè
thĕ trúth” (the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) may be contrasted with “Têll mé thĕ
trûth” (whatever you may tell other people); “bláck bîrd” (any bird black in colour) may be
contrasted with “bláckbìrd” (that particular bird Turdus merula). The verbs permít and
recórd (henceforth only primary stresses are marked) may be contrasted with their
corresponding nouns pérmit and récord. A feeling for antepenultimate (third syllable from
the end) primary stress, revealed in such five-syllable words as equanímity, longitúdinal,
notoríety, opportúnity, parsimónious, pertinácity, and vegetárian, causes stress to shift
when extra syllables are added, as in histórical, a derivative of hístory and theatricálity, a
derivative of theátrical. Vowel qualities are also changed here and in such word groups as
périod, periódical, periodícity; phótograph, photógraphy, photográphable. French stress
may be sustained in many borrowed words; e.g., bizárre, critíque, duréss, hotél, prestíge,
and techníque.
Pitch, or musical tone, determined chiefly by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords, may
be level, falling, rising, or falling–rising. In counting one, two, three, four, one naturally
gives level pitch to each of these cardinal numerals. But if people say I want two, not one,
they naturally give two a falling tone and one a falling–rising tone. In the question One?
rising pitch is used. Word tone is called accent, and sentence tone is referred to as
intonation. The end-of-sentence cadence is important for expressing differences in meaning.
Several end-of-sentence intonations are possible, but three are especially common: falling,
rising, and falling–rising. Falling intonation is used in completed statements, direct
commands, and sometimes in general questions unanswerable by yes or no (e.g., I have
nothing to add; keep to the right; who told you that?). Rising intonation is frequently used
in open-ended statements made with some reservation, in polite requests, and in particular
questions answerable by yes or no (e.g., I have nothing more to say at the moment; let me
know how you get on; are you sure?). The third type of end-of-sentence intonation, first
falling and then rising pitch, is used in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts (e.g.,
some people do like them [but others do not]; don’t say I didn’t warn you [because that is
just what I’m now doing]). Intonation is on the whole less singsong in American than in
British English, and there is a narrower range of pitch. Everywhere English is spoken,
regional accents display distinctive patterns of intonation.
Morphology
Inflection
Modern English nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are inflected. Adverbs, prepositions,
conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.
Most English nouns have plural inflection in (-e)s, but that form shows variations in
pronunciation in the words cats (with a final s sound), dogs (with a final z sound), and
horses (with a final iz sound), as also in the 3rd person singular present-tense forms of
verbs: cuts (s), jogs (z), and forces (iz). Seven nouns have mutated (umlauted) plurals: man,
men; woman, women; tooth, teeth; foot, feet; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice. Three
have plurals in -en: ox, oxen; child, children; brother, brethren. Some remain unchanged
(e.g., deer, sheep, moose, grouse). Five of the seven personal pronouns have distinctive
forms for subject and object (e.g., he/him, she/her). Adjectives have distinctive endings for
comparison (e.g., comparative bigger, superlative biggest), with several irregular forms
(e.g., good, better, best).
The forms of verbs are not complex. Only the substantive verb (to be) has eight forms: be,
am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Strong verbs have five forms: ride, rides, rode, riding,
ridden. Regular or weak verbs customarily have four: walk, walks, walked, walking. Some
that end in t or d have three forms only: cut, cuts, cutting.
In addition to the above inflections, English employs two other main morphological
(structural) processes—affixation and composition—and two subsidiary ones—back-
formation and blend.
Affixation
Affixes, word elements attached to words, may either precede, as prefixes (do, undo; way,
subway), or follow, as suffixes (do, doer; way, wayward). They may be native (overdo,
waywardness), Greek (hyperbole, thesis), or Latin (supersede, pediment). Modern
technologists greatly favour the neo-Hellenic prefixes macro-“long, large,” micro- “small,”
para- “alongside,” poly- “many,” and the Latin mini- “small,” with its antonym maxi-. The
early Internet era popularized cyber- “of computers or computer networks” and mega-
“vast.” Greek and Latin affixes have become so fully acclimatized that they can occur
together in one and the same word, as, indeed, in ac-climat-ize-d, just used, consisting of a
Latin prefix plus a Greek stem plus a Greek suffix plus an English inflection. Suffixes are
bound more closely than prefixes to the stems or root elements of words. Consider, for
instance, the wide variety of agent suffixes in the nouns actor, artisan, dotard, engineer,
financier, hireling, magistrate, merchant, scientist, secretary, songster, student, and worker.
Suffixes may come to be attached to stems quite fortuitously, but, once attached, they are
likely to be permanent. At the same time, one suffix can perform many functions. The suffix
-er denotes the doer of the action in the words worker, driver, and hunter; the instrument in
chopper, harvester, and roller; and the dweller in Icelander, Londoner, and Trobriander. It
refers to things or actions associated with the basic concept in the words breather, “pause to
take breath”; diner, “dining car on a train”; and fiver, “five-pound note.” In the terms
disclaimer, misnomer, and rejoinder (all from French), the suffix denotes one single instance
of the action expressed by the verb. Usage may prove capricious. Whereas a writer is a
person, a typewriter is a machine. For some time a computer was both, but now the word is
no longer used of persons.
Composition
Composition, or compounding, is concerned with free forms. The primary compounds
cloverleaf, gentleman, and (less obviously, because of the spelling) already show the
collocation of two free forms. They differ from word groups or phrases in stress, juncture,
or vowel quality or by a combination of these. Thus, already differs from all ready in stress
and juncture, cloverleaf from clover leaf in stress, and gentleman from gentle man in vowel
quality, stress, and juncture. In describing the structure of compound words it is necessary
to take into account the relation of components to each other and the relation of the whole
compound to its components. These relations diverge widely in, for example, the words
cloverleaf, icebreaker, breakwater, blackbird, peace-loving, and paperback. In cloverleaf
the first component noun is attributive and modifies the second, as also in the terms aircraft,
beehive, landmark, lifeline, network, and vineyard. Icebreaker, however, is a compound
made up of noun object plus agent noun, itself consisting of verb plus agent suffix, as also
in the words bridgebuilder, landowner, metalworker, minelayer, and timekeeper. The next
type consists of verb plus object. It is rare in English, Dutch, and German but frequent in
French, Spanish, and Italian. The English pastime may be compared, for example, with the
French passe-temps, the Spanish pasatiempo, and the Italian passatempo. From French
comes passport, meaning “pass (i.e., enter) harbour.” From Italian comes portfolio,
meaning “carry leaf.” Other words of this type are daredevil, scapegrace, and scarecrow.
As for the blackbird type, consisting of attributive adjective plus noun, it occurs frequently,
as in the terms bluebell, grandson, shorthand, and wildfire. The next type, composed of
object noun and a present participle, as in the terms fact-finding, heart-rending (German
herzzerreissend), life-giving (German lebenspendend), painstaking, and time-consuming,
occurs rarely. The last type is seen in barefoot, bluebeard, hunchback, leatherneck,
redbreast, and scatterbrain.
Back-formations, blends, and other types of word-formation

Back-formations and blends are widespread. Back-formation is the reverse of affixation,
being the analogical creation of a new word from an existing word falsely assumed to be its
derivative. For example, the verb to edit has been formed from the noun editor on the
reverse analogy of the noun actor from to act, and similarly the verbs automate, bulldoze,
commute, escalate, liaise, loaf, sightsee, and televise are backformed from the nouns
automation, bulldozer, commuter, escalation, liaison, loafer, sightseer, and television. From
the single noun procession are backformed two verbs with different stresses and meanings:
procéss, “to walk in procession,” and prócess, “to subject food (and other material) to a
special operation.”
Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as bash from bang and smash; and (2)
telescoped forms, called portmanteau words, such as motorcade from motor cavalcade. In
the first group are the words clash, from clack and crash, and geep, offspring of goat and
sheep. To the second group belong dormobiles, or dormitory automobiles, and slurbs, or
slum suburbs. A travel monologue becomes a travelogue and a telegram sent by cable a
cablegram. Aviation electronics becomes avionics; biology electronics, bionics; and nuclear
electronics, nucleonics. In cablese a question mark is a quark; in computerese a binary unit
is a bit. In astrophysics a quasistellar source of radio energy becomes a quasar, and a
pulsating star becomes a pulsar.
Simple shortenings, such as ad for advertisement, that some time ago might have been
sneered at by some are now in common use. They are listed in dictionaries side by side with
their full forms. Among such abbreviations are exam, gym, lab, lib, op, spec, sub, tech, veg,
and vet. Compound shortenings, after the pattern of Russian agitprop for agitatsiya
propaganda, are also used. Initial syllables are joined as in the words linocut (linoleum cut)
and FORTRAN (formula translation); these shortenings are not uncommon in, and often
become, the names of corporations and other organizations (FedEx [Federal Express],
Intelsat [International Telecommunications Satellite Organization]).
Syntax
Sentences can be classified as follows:
(A) simple, containing one clause and predication: Jane knows this country
(B) multiple or compound, containing two or more coordinate clauses: Jane has been here before, and she
knows this country
(C) complex, containing one or more main clauses and one or more subordinate clauses: Jane, who has been
here before, knows this country or Because she has been here before, Jane knows this country
Simple, declarative, affirmative sentences have two main patterns with five subsidiary
patterns within each. Verb and complement together form the predicate. “Complement” is
used here to cover both the complement and the object of traditional grammarians.
The table listing sentences (1) through (5) provides examples of the first main pattern. The
sentences of the first pattern consist of three parts: subject, verb, and complement. In Jane
knows this country (1), the complement is the direct object of a transitive verb; in Science is
organized knowledge (2), it is a predicative nominal group forming the second component
of an equation linked to the first part by the meaningless copula is; in Elizabeth becomes
queen (3), it is a predicative noun linked with the subject by the meaningful copula
becomes; in The captain falls sick (4), it is a predicative adjective; and in Nothing passes
unobserved (5), it is a predicative past participle.
Simple sentences—first pattern

subject verb complement
1. Jane knows this country
2. Science is organized knowledge
3. Elizabeth becomes queen
4. The captain falls sick
5. Nothing passes unobserved
The table listing sentences (6) through (10) shows the second pattern. In the second main
pattern, each sentence contains four components: subject, verb, and two complements, first
and second or inner and outer. In John gives Mary a ring (6), inner and outer complements
consist of indirect object (without preposition) followed by direct object; in The sailors
make John captain (7), these complements are direct object and appositive noun; in You
have kept your record clean (8), direct object and predicative adjective; in The driver finds
the road flooded (9), direct object and predicative past participle; and in We want you to
know (10), direct object and predicative infinitive.
Simple sentences—second pattern

Simple sentences—second pattern

subject verb inner complement outer complement
6. John gives Mary a ring
7. The sailors make John captain
8. You have kept your record clean
9. The driver finds the road flooded
10. We want you to know
One can seldom change the word order in these 10 sentences without doing something else
—adding or subtracting a word, changing the meaning. There is no better way of
appreciating the importance of word position than by scrutinizing the 10 frames illustrated.
If, for instance, in (6) one reverses inner and outer complements, one adds to and says, John
gives a ring to Mary; one does not say John gives a ring Mary. Some verbs, such as explain
and say, never omit the preposition to before the indirect object: John’s mother explained
the details to her son. If, in (10), the inner and outer complements are reversed (e.g., We
want to know you), the meaning is changed as well as the structure.
Apart from these fundamental rules of word order, the principles governing the positions of
adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions call for brief comment. For attributive adjectives the
rule is simple: single words regularly precede the noun, and word groups follow—e.g., an
unforgettable experience but an experience never to be forgotten. It is also possible,
however, to abandon this principle and switch groups to front position: a never to be
forgotten experience. In the ordering of multiple epithets, on the other hand, some
tendencies can be seen. Attributes denoting permanent qualities stand nearest their head
nouns: long, white beard; six-lane elevated freeway. The order in multiple attribution tends
to be as follows: determiner; quantifier; adjective of quality; adjective of size, shape, or
texture; adjective of colour or material; noun adjunct (if any); head noun. Examples
include: that one solid, round, oak dining table; these many fine, large, black racehorses;
those countless memorable, long, bright summer evenings.
Adverbs are more mobile than adjectives. Nevertheless, some principles seem to be at
work. Adverbs of frequency tend to come immediately after the substantive verb (You are
often late), before other verbs (You never know), and between auxiliaries and full verbs (You
can never tell). In this last instance, however, American differs from British usage. Most
Americans would place the adverb before the auxiliary and say You never can tell. (In the
title of his play of that name, first performed in 1899, George Bernard Shaw avowedly
followed American usage.) Adverbs of time usually occur at the beginning or end of a
sentence, seldom in the middle. Particular expressions normally precede more general ones:
The bridge opened at 9 o’clock in the morning on October 23 of last year. An adverb of
place or direction follows a verb with which it is semantically bound: We arrived home
after dark. Other adverbs normally take end positions in the order of manner, place, and
time: The bird flew suddenly [manner] from the tree [place] a few minutes ago [time].
In spite of its etymology (Latin prae-positio “before placing”), a preposition may

sometimes follow the noun it governs, as in all the world over, slept the clock round, and
the whole place through. This seems a good place to live in seems more natural to most
speakers than This seems a good place in which to live. Have you anything to open this can
with? is more common than Have you anything with which to open this can?
The above are principles rather than rules, and such structural flexibility makes it easy to
find ambiguity in isolated sentences. When walking snipe always approach up wind, a
shooting manual directs. The writer intends the reader to understand, “When you are
walking to flush snipe, always approach them up against the wind.” John kept the car in the
garage can mean either (1) “John retained that car you see in the garage, and sold his other
one” or (2) “John housed the car in the garage, and not elsewhere.” Flying planes can be
dangerous is ambiguous because it may mean either (1) “Planes that fly can be dangerous”
or (2) “It is dangerous to fly planes.” On the other hand, such “ambiguities” almost always
disappear when the sentences are seen in context.
Two ways in which John gives Mary a ring can be stated in the passive are: (1) A ring is
given to Mary by John and (2) Mary is given a ring by John. Concerning this same action,
four types of questions can be formulated: (1) Who gives Mary a ring? The information
sought is the identity of the giver. (2) Does John give Mary a ring? The question may be
answered by yes or no. (3) John gives Mary a ring, doesn’t he? Confirmation is sought of
the questioner’s belief that John does in fact give Mary a ring. (4) John gives Mary a ring?
This form, differing from the declarative statement only by the question mark in writing, or
by rising intonation in speech, calls, like sentences (2) and (3), for a yes or no answer but
suggests doubt on the part of the questioner that the action is taking place.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately a quarter Germanic (Old English,
Scandinavian, Dutch, German) and two-thirds Italic or Romance (especially Latin, French,
Spanish, Italian), with copious and increasing importations from Greek in science and
technology and with considerable borrowings from more than 300 other languages. Names
of many basic concepts and things come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon: heaven and
earth, love and hate, life and death, beginning and end, day and night, month and year, heat
and cold, way and path, meadow and stream. Cardinal numerals come from Old English, as
do all the ordinal numerals except second (Old English other, which still retains its older
meaning in “every other day”). Second comes from Latin secundus “following,” through
French second, related to Latin sequi “to follow,” as in English sequence. From Old English
come all the personal pronouns (except they, their, and them, which are from Scandinavian),
the auxiliary verbs (except the marginal used, which is from French), most simple
prepositions, and all conjunctions.
Numerous nouns would be identical whether they came from Old English or Scandinavian:
father, mother, brother (but not sister); man, wife; ground, land, tree, grass; summer, winter;
cliff, dale. Many verbs would also be identical, especially monosyllabic verbs—bring,
come, get, hear, meet, see, set, sit, spin, stand, think. The same is true of the adjectives full
and wise; the colour names gray (grey), green, and white; the possessives mine and thine
(but not ours and yours); the terms north and west (but not south and east); and the
prepositions over and under. Just a few English and Scandinavian doublets coexist in
current speech: no and nay, yea and ay, from and fro, rear (i.e., “to bring up”) and raise,
shirt and skirt (both related to the adjective short), less and loose. From Scandinavian, law
was borrowed early, whence bylaw, meaning village law, and outlaw, meaning “man
outside the law.” Husband (hus-bondi) meant “householder,” whether single or married,
whereas fellow (fe-lagi) meant one who “lays fee” or shares property with another, and so
“partner, shareholder.” From Scandinavian come the common nouns axle (tree), band,
birth, bloom, crook, dirt, egg, gait, gap, girth, knife, loan, race, rift, root, score, seat, skill,
sky, snare, thrift, and window; the adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, rotten, rugged,
sly, tight, ugly, weak, and wrong; and many verbs, including call, cast, clasp, clip, crave,
die, droop, drown, flit, gape, gasp, glitter, life, rake, rid, scare, scowl, skulk, snub, sprint,
thrive, thrust, and want.
The debt of the English language to French is large. The terms president, representative,
legislature, congress, constitution, and parliament are all French. So, too, are duke,
marquis, viscount, and baron; but king, queen, lord, lady, earl, and knight are English. City,
village, court, palace, manor, mansion, residence, and domicile are French; but town,
borough, hall, house, bower, room, and home are English. Comparison between the many
pairs of English and French synonyms shows that the former are more human and concrete,
the latter more intellectual and abstract; e.g., the terms freedom and liberty, friendship and
amity, hatred and enmity, love and affection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity,
lying and mendacity. The superiority of French cooking is duly recognized by the adoption
of such culinary terms as boil, broil, fry, grill, roast, souse, and toast. Breakfast is English,
but dinner and supper are French. Hunt is English, but chase, quarry, scent, and track are
French. Craftsmen bear names of English origin: baker, builder, fisher (man), hedger, miller,
shepherd, shoemaker, wainwright, and weaver, or webber. Names of skilled artisans,
however, are French: carpenter, draper, haberdasher, joiner, mason, painter, plumber, and
tailor. Many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine and viniculture, politics and
diplomacy, drama and literature, art and ballet come from French.
In the spheres of science and technology many terms come from Classical Greek through
French or directly from Greek. Pioneers in research and development now regard Greek as
a kind of inexhaustible quarry from which they can draw linguistic material at will. By
prefixing the Greek adverb tēle “far away, distant” to the existing compound photography,
“light writing,” they create the precise (though today rarely used) term telephotography to
denote the photographing of distant objects by means of a special lens, known as a
telephoto lens. By inserting the prefix micro- “small” into this same compound, they make
the new term photomicrography, denoting the electronic photographing of bacteria and
viruses. Such neo-Hellenic derivatives would probably have been unintelligible to Plato and
Aristotle. Many Greek compounds and derivatives have Latin equivalents with slight or
considerable differentiations in meaning (see table).
Equivalent compounds and derivatives*

nouns from the Greek nouns from the Latin
dys-troph-y mal-nutr-it-ion
hypo-sta-sis sub-stan-ce
hypo-the-sis sup-pos-it-ion
meta-morph-o-sis trans-form-at-ion
meta-phor trans-fer
meta-the-sis trans-pos-it-ion
peri-pher-y circum-fer-en-ce
peri-phra-sis circum-loc-ut-ion
sym-path-y com-pass-ion
syn-drom-e con-curr-en-ce
syn-op-sis con-spect-us
syn-the-sis com-pos-it-ion
sy-zyg-y con-junc-t-ion
adjectives from the Greek adjectives from the Latin
dia-phan-ous trans-par-ent
hyper-aesth-et-ic super-sens-it-ive
hyper-phys-ic-al super-nat-ur-al
hypo-derm-ic sub-cut-an-eous
hypo-ge-al sub-terr-an-ean
melan-chol-ic atra-bil-ious
mono-morph-ic uni-form
oxy-phyll-ous acut-i-fol-i-ate
peri-pat-et-ic circum-amb-ul-at-ory
phos-phor-escent lumin-i-fer-ous
poly-glott-al multi-lingu-al
sphen-oid cunei-form
syn-chron-ic con-temp-or-ary
*The italicized suffixes -al, -escent, and -ous, attached to some of the Greek adjectives, are of Latin origin.
At first sight it might appear that some of these equivalents, such as metamorphosis (from
the Greek) and transformation (from the Latin), are sufficiently synonymous to make one or
the other redundant. In fact, however, metamorphosis is more technical and therefore more
restricted than transformation. In mythology, metamorphosis signifies a magical shape
changing; in nature it denotes a postembryonic development such as that of a tadpole into a
frog, a cocoon into a silkworm, or a chrysalis into a butterfly. Transformation, on the other
hand, means any kind of change from one state to another.
Ever since the 12th century, when merchants from the Netherlands made homes in East
Anglia, Dutch words have infiltrated into Midland speech. For centuries a form of Low
German was used by seafaring men in North Sea ports. Old nautical terms still in use
include buoy, deck, dock, freebooter, hoist, leak, pump, skipper, and yacht. The Dutch in
New Amsterdam (later New York) and adjacent settlements gave the words boss, cookie,
dope, snoop, and waffle to American speech. The Dutch in Cape Province gave the terms
apartheid, commandeer, commando, spoor, and trek to South African speech.
The contribution of High German has been on a different level. In the 18th and 19th
centuries it lay in technicalities of geology and mineralogy and in abstractions relating to
literature, philosophy, and psychology. In the 20th century this contribution was sometimes
indirect. Unclear and meaningful echoed German unklar and bedeutungsvoll, or sinnvoll.
Ring road (a British term applied to roads encircling cities or parts of cities) translated
Ringstrasse; round trip came from Rundfahrt; and the turn of the century from die
Jahrhundertwende. The terms classless society, inferiority complex, and wishful thinking
echoed die klassenlose Gesellschaft, der Minderwertigkeitskomplex, and das
Wunschdenken.
Along with the rest of the Western world, English has accepted Italian as the language of
music. The names of voices, parts, performers, instruments, forms of composition, and
technical directions are all Italian. Many of the latter—allegro, andante, cantabile,
crescendo, diminuendo, legato, maestoso, obbligato, pizzicato, staccato, and vibrato—are
also used metaphorically. In architecture, the terms belvedere, corridor, cupola, grotto,
pedestal, pergola, piazza, pilaster, and rotunda are accepted; in literature, burlesque, canto,
extravaganza, stanza, and many more are used.
From Spanish, English has acquired the words armada, cannibal, cigar, galleon, guerrilla,
matador, mosquito, quadroon, tornado, and vanilla, some of these loanwords going back to
the 16th century, when sea dogs encountered hidalgos on the high seas. Many names of
animals and plants have entered English from indigenous languages through Spanish:
potato through Spanish patata from Taino batata, and tomato through Spanish tomate from
Nahuatl tomatl. Other words have entered from Latin America by way of Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona, and California; e.g., such words as canyon, cigar, estancia, lasso,
mustang, pueblo, and rodeo. Some have gathered new connotations: bonanza, originally
denoting “goodness,” came through miners’ slang to mean “spectacular windfall,
prosperity”; mañana, “tomorrow,” acquired an undertone of mysterious unpredictability.
From Arabic through European Spanish, through French from Spanish, through Latin, or
occasionally through Greek, English has obtained the terms alchemy, alcohol, alembic,
algebra, alkali, almanac, arsenal, assassin, attar, azimuth, cipher, elixir, mosque, nadir,
naphtha, sugar, syrup, zenith, and zero. From Egyptian Arabic, English has borrowed the
term loofah (also spelled luffa). From Hebrew, directly or by way of Vulgate Latin, come
the terms amen, cherub, hallelujah, manna, messiah, pharisee, rabbi, sabbath, and seraph;
jubilee, leviathan, and shibboleth; and, more recently, kosher and kibbutz.
English has freely adopted and adapted words from many other languages, acquiring them
sometimes directly and sometimes by devious routes. Each word has its own history. The
following lists indicate the origins of a number of English words:
Hindi—nabob, guru, sahib, maharajah, mahatma, pundit, punch (drink), juggernaut, cushy, jungle, thug,
cheetah, shampoo, chit, dungaree, pucka, gymkhana, mantra, loot, pajamas, dinghy, polo
Tamil—pariah, curry, catamaran, mulligatawny
Welsh—flannel, coracle, cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod
Cornish—gull, brill, dolmen
Gaelic and Irish—shamrock, brogue, leprechaun, ogham, Tory, galore, blarney, hooligan, clan, claymore, bog,
plaid, slogan, sporran, cairn, whisky, pibroch
Persian—paradise, divan, purdah, lilac, bazaar, shah, caravan, chess, salamander, taffeta, shawl, khaki
Breton—menhir
Norwegian—ski, ombudsman
Finnish—sauna
Russian—kvass, ruble, tsar, verst, mammoth, ukase, astrakhan, vodka, samovar, tundra (from Sami), troika,
pogrom, duma, soviet, bolshevik, intelligentsia (from Latin through Polish), borscht, balalaika, sputnik, soyuz,
salyut, lunokhod
Polish—mazurka
Czech—robot
Hungarian—goulash, paprika
Turkish—janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk, caviar, pasha, odalisque, fez, bosh
Chinese—tea (Amoy), sampan, ketchup
Japanese—shogun, kimono, mikado, tycoon, hara-kiri, gobang, judo, jujitsu, bushido, samurai, banzai,
tsunami, satsuma, Noh (the dance drama), karate, Kabuki
Malay—ketchup, sago, bamboo, junk, amuck, orangutan, compound (fenced area), raffia
languages of the Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia—kangaroo (Guugu
Yimidhirr), corroboree, wallaby, wombat, boomerang, koala (Dharuk), budgerigar (Yuwaalaraay)
Polynesian—taboo (Tongan), tattoo (Tahitian)
Hawaiian—ukulele
Kongo—chimpanzee
Bantu—gumbo
Zulu—impala, mamba
Inuit—kayak, igloo, anorak
Yupik—mukluk
Algonquian—totem
Nahuatl—mescal
Taino—hammock, hurricane, tobacco, maize
Arawak and Carib—iguana
Portuguese—marmalade, flamingo, molasses, veranda, port (wine), dodo
Basque—bizarre
Orthography
The Latin alphabet originally had 20 letters, the present English alphabet minus J, K, V, W,
Y, and Z. The Romans themselves added K for use in abbreviations and Y and Z in words
transcribed from Greek. After its adoption by the English, this 23-letter alphabet developed
W as a ligatured doubling of U and later J and V as consonantal variants of I and U. The
resultant alphabet of 26 letters has both uppercase, or capital, and lowercase, or small,
letters.
English spelling is based for the most part on that of

the 15th century, but pronunciation has changed
considerably since then, especially that of long vowels
and diphthongs. The extensive change in the
pronunciation of vowels, known as the Great Vowel
International Phonetic Alphabet Shift, affected all of Geoffrey Chaucer’s seven long
vowels, and for centuries spelling remained untidy. If
the meaning of the message was clear, the spelling of individual words seemed
unimportant. In the 17th century compositors began to adopt fixed spellings for practical
reasons, and in the order-loving 18th century uniformity became more and more
fashionable. Since Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755),
orthography has remained fairly stable. Numerous changes, such as music for musick (c.
1880) and fantasy for phantasy (c. 1920), have been accepted, but spelling has nevertheless
continued to be in part unphonetic. Attempts have been made at reform. Indeed, every
century has had its reformers since the 13th, when an Augustinian canon named Orm
devised his own method of differentiating short vowels from long by doubling the
succeeding consonants or, when this was not feasible, by marking short vowels with a
superimposed breve mark (˘). William Caxton, who set up his wooden printing press at
Westminster in 1476, was much concerned with spelling problems throughout his working
life. Noah Webster produced his Spelling Book, in 1783, as a precursor to the first edition
(1828) of his American Dictionary of the English Language. The 20th century produced
many zealous reformers. Three systems, supplementary to traditional spelling, were
proposed for different purposes: (1) the Initial Teaching (Augmented Roman) Alphabet
(ITA) of 44 letters used by some educationists in the 1970s and ’80s in the teaching of
children under age seven; (2) the Shaw alphabet of 48 letters, designed in the
implementation of the will of George Bernard Shaw; and (3) the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA), constructed on the basis of one symbol for one individual sound and used
by many trained linguists. Countless other systems have been worked out from time to time,
such as R.E. Zachrisson’s “Anglic” (1930) and Axel Wijk’s Regularized English (1959).
Drastic reform remains impracticable, undesirable, and unlikely. This is because there is no
longer one criterion of correct pronunciation but several standards throughout the world;
regional standards are themselves not static, but changing with each new generation; and, if
spelling were changed drastically, all the books in English in the world’s public and private
libraries would become inaccessible to readers without special study. In the days when one
country “owned” the English language, reform was feasible—and Noah Webster’s
proposals for American English did indeed have some success—but today, when English is
so widespread that no country can be said to own it, agreement on simplification is
inconceivable.
Historical background
Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most
clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries;
the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin
Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the
Statute of Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in English);
the setting up of William Caxton’s printing press at Westminster in 1476; the full flowering
of the Renaissance in the 16th century; the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611; the
completion of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755; and the expansion to North America
and South Africa in the 17th century and to India, Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.
Old English
The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively,
before settling in Britain. According to the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English
people, the first Jutes, Hengist and Horsa, landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet in 449;
and the Jutes later settled in Kent, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons
occupied the rest of England south of the Thames, as well as modern Middlesex and Essex.
The Angles eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth,
including the future Edinburgh and the Scottish Lowlands. In both Latin and Common
Germanic the Angles’ name was Angli, later mutated in Old English to Engle (nominative)
and Engla (genitive). Engla land designated the home of all three tribes collectively, and
both King Alfred (known as Alfred the Great) and Abbot Aelfric, author and grammarian,
subsequently referred to their speech as Englisc. Nevertheless, all the evidence indicates
that Jutes, Angles, and Saxons retained their distinctive dialects.
The River Humber was an important boundary, and

the Anglian-speaking region developed two speech
groups: to the north of the river, Northumbrian, and,
to the south, Southumbrian, usually referred to as
Mercian. There were thus four dialects:
Old English dialects: distribution Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. In
the 8th century, the Northumbrian speech group led in
literature and culture, but that leadership was destroyed by the Viking invaders, who sacked
Lindisfarne, an island near the Northumbrian mainland, in 793. They landed in strength in
865. The first raiders were Danes, but they were later joined by Norwegians from Ireland
and the Western Isles who settled in modern Cumberland, Westmorland, northwest
Yorkshire, Lancashire, north Cheshire, and the Isle of Man. In the 9th century, as a result of
the Norwegian invasions, cultural leadership passed from Northumbria to Wessex. During
King Alfred’s reign, in the last three decades of the 9th century, Winchester became the
chief centre of learning. There the Parker Chronicle (a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle) was written; there the Latin works of the priest and historian Paulus Orosius, St.
Augustine, St. Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were translated; and there the native poetry
of Northumbria and Mercia was transcribed into the West Saxon dialect. This resulted in
West Saxon’s becoming “standard Old English.” About a century later, when Aelfric wrote
his lucid and mature prose at Winchester, Cerne Abbas, and Eynsham, the hegemony of
Wessex was strengthened.
In standard Old English, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and verbs were fully inflected. Nouns
were inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular and
plural. Five nouns of first kinship—faeder, mōdor, brōthor, sweostor, and dohtor (“father,”
“mother,” “brother,” “sister,” and “daughter,” respectively)—had their own set of
inflections. There were 25 nouns such as mon, men (“man,” “men”) with mutated, or
umlauted, stems. Adjectives had strong and weak declensions, the strong showing a mixture
of noun and pronoun endings and the weak following the pattern of weak nouns. Personal,
possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite, and relative pronouns had full
inflections. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons still had distinctive dual forms:
iċ “I” wit “we two” wē “we”

thū (þū) “thou” ġit “you two” ġē “you”
There were two demonstratives: sē, sēo, thaet, meaning “that,” and thes, thēos, this,
meaning “this,” but no articles, the definite article being expressed by use of the
demonstrative for “that” or not expressed at all. Thus, “the good man” was sē gōda mon or
plain gōd mon. The function of the indefinite article was performed by the numeral ān
“one” in ān mon “a man,” by the adjective-pronoun sum in sum mon “a (certain) man,” or
not expressed, as in thū eart gōd mon “you are a good man.”
Verbs had two tenses only (present-future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive,
and imperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd).
There were two classes of verb stems. (A verb stem is that part of a verb to which
inflectional changes—changes indicating tense, mood, number, etc.—are added.) One type
of verb stem, called vocalic because an internal vowel shows variations, is exemplified by
the verb for “sing”: singan, singth, sang, sungon, gesungen. The word for “deem” is an
example of the other, called consonantal: dēman, dēmth, dēmde, dēmdon, gedēmed. Such
verbs are called strong and weak, respectively.
All new verbs, whether derived from existing verbs or from nouns, belonged to the
consonantal type. Some verbs of great frequency (antecedents of the modern words be,
shall, will, do, go, can, may, and so on) had their own peculiar patterns of inflections.
Grammatical gender persisted throughout the Old English period. Just as Germans now say
der Fuss, die Hand, and das Auge (masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for “the foot,”
“the hand,” and “the eye”), so, for these same structures, Aelfric said sē fōt, sēo hond, and
thaet ēaġe, also masculine, feminine, and neuter. The three words for “woman,” wīfmon,
cwene, and wīf, were masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively. Hors “horse,” sċēap
“sheep,” and maeġden “maiden” were all neuter. Eorthe “earth” was feminine, but lond
“land” was neuter. Sunne “sun” was feminine, but mōna “moon” was masculine. This
simplification of grammatical gender resulted from the fact that the gender of Old English
substantives was not always indicated by the ending but rather by the terminations of the
adjectives and demonstrative pronouns used with the substantives. When these endings
were lost, all outward marks of gender disappeared with them. Thus, the weakening of
inflections and loss of gender occurred together. In the North, where inflections weakened
earlier, the marks of gender likewise disappeared first. They survived in the South as late as
the 14th century.
Because of the greater use of inflections in Old English, word order was freer than today.
The sequence of subject, verb, and complement was normal, but when there were outer and
inner complements the second was put in the dative case after to: Sē biscop hālgode Ēadrēd
tō cyninge “The bishop consecrated Edred king.” After an introductory adverb or adverbial
phrase the verb generally took second place as in modern German: Nū bydde iċ ān thing
“Now I ask [literally, “ask I”] one thing”; Thȳ ilcan gēare gesette Aelfrēd cyning
Lundenburg “In that same year Alfred the king occupied London.” Impersonal verbs had no
subject expressed. Infinitives constructed with auxiliary verbs were placed at the ends of
clauses or sentences: Hīe ne dorston forth bī thære ēa siglan “They dared not sail beyond
that river” (siglan is the infinitive); Iċ wolde thās lytlan bōc āwendan “I wanted to translate
this little book” (āwendan is the infinitive). The verb usually came last in a dependent
clause—e.g., āwrītan wile in gif hwā thās bōc āwrītan wile (gerihte hē hīe be thære bysene)
“If anyone wants to copy this book (let him correct his copy by the original).” Prepositions
(or postpositions) frequently followed their objects. Negation was often repeated for
emphasis.
Middle English
One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was to place all four Old English dialects more
or less on a level. West Saxon lost its supremacy, and

the centre of culture and learning gradually shifted
from Winchester to London. The old Northumbrian
dialect became divided into Scottish and Northern,
although little is known of either of these divisions
Middle English dialects before the end of the 13th century. The old Mercian
dialect was split into East and West Midland. West
Saxon became slightly diminished in area and was more appropriately named the South
Western dialect. The Kentish dialect was considerably extended and was called South
Eastern accordingly. All five Middle English dialects (Northern, West Midland, East
Midland, South Western, and South Eastern) went their own ways and developed their own
characteristics. The so-called Katherine Group of writings (c. 1180–1210), associated with
Hereford, a town not far from the Welsh border, adhered most closely to native traditions,
and there is something to be said for regarding this West Midland dialect, least disturbed by
French and Scandinavian intrusions, as a kind of Standard English in the High Middle
Ages.
Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was to change the writing of English from the
clear and easily readable insular hand of Irish origin to the delicate Carolingian script then
in use on the Continent. With the change in appearance came a change in spelling. Norman
scribes wrote Old English y as u, ȳ as ui, ū as ou (ow when final). Thus, mycel (“much”)
appeared as muchel, fȳr (“fire”) as fuir, hūs (“house”) as hous, and hū (“how”) as how. For
the sake of clarity (i.e., legibility) u was often written o before and after m, n, u, v, and w;
and i was sometimes written y before and after m and n. So sunu (“son”) appeared as sone
and him (“him”) as hym. Old English cw was changed to qu; hw to wh, qu, or quh; ċ to ch or
tch; sċ to sh; -ċġ- to -gg-; and -ht to ght. So Old English cwēn appeared as queen; hwaet as
what, quat, or quhat; dīċ as ditch; sċip as ship; secge as segge; and miht as might.
For the first century after the Conquest, most loanwords came from Normandy and Picardy,
but with the extension south to the Pyrenees of the Angevin empire of Henry II (reigned
1154–89), other dialects, especially Central French, or Francien, contributed to the speech
of the aristocracy. As a result, Modern English acquired the forms canal, catch, leal, real,
reward, wage, warden, and warrant from Norman French side by side with the
corresponding forms channel, chase, loyal, royal, regard, gage, guardian, and guarantee,
from Francien. King John lost Normandy in 1204. With the increasing power of the
Capetian kings of Paris, Francien gradually predominated. Meanwhile, Latin stood intact as
the language of learning. For three centuries, therefore, the literature of England was
trilingual. Ancrene Riwle, for instance, a guide or rule (riwle) of rare quality for recluses or
anchorites (ancren), was disseminated in all three languages.
The sounds of the native speech changed slowly. Even in late Old English short vowels had
been lengthened before ld, rd, mb, and nd, and long vowels had been shortened before all
other consonant groups and before double consonants. In early Middle English short vowels
of whatever origin were lengthened in the open stressed syllables of disyllabic words. An
open syllable is one ending in a vowel. Both syllables in Old English nama “name,” mete
“meat, food,” nosu “nose,” wicu “week,” and duru “door” were short, and the first syllables,
being stressed, were lengthened to nāme, mēte, nōse, wēke, and dōre in the 13th and 14th
centuries. A similar change occurred in 4th-century Latin, in 13th-century German, and at
different times in other languages. The popular notion has arisen that final mute -e in
English makes a preceding vowel long; in fact, it is the lengthening of the vowel that has
caused e to be lost in pronunciation. On the other hand, Old English long vowels were
shortened in the first syllables of trisyllabic words, even when those syllables were open;
e.g., hāligdaeg “holy day,” ærende “message, errand,” crīstendōm “Christianity,” and
sūtherne “southern” became hǒliday (Northern hăliday), ěrrende, chrǐstendom, and
sǔtherne. This principle still operates in current English. Compare, for example, trisyllabic
derivatives such as the words chastity, criminal, fabulous, gradual, gravity, linear, national,
ominous, sanity, and tabulate with the simple nouns and adjectives chaste, crime, fable,
grade, grave, line, nation, omen, sane, and table.
There were significant variations in verb inflections in the Northern, Midland, and Southern
dialects, as shown in the table comparing the word sing across these dialects. The Northern
infinitive was already one syllable (sing rather than the Old English singan), whereas the
past participle -en inflection of Old English was strictly kept. These apparently
contradictory features can be attributed entirely to Scandinavian, in which the final -n of the
infinitive was lost early in singa, and the final -n of the past participle was doubled in
sunginn. The Northern unmutated present participle in -and was also of Scandinavian
origin. Old English mutated -ende (German -end) in the present participle had already
become -inde in late West Saxon, and it was this Southern -inde that blended with the -ing
suffix (German -ung) of nouns of action that had already become near-gerunds in such
compound nouns as athswering “oath swearing” and writingfether “writing feather, pen.”
This blending of present participle and gerund was further helped by the fact that Anglo-
Norman and French -ant was itself a coalescence of Latin present participles in -antem, -
entem, and Latin gerunds in -andum, -endum. The Northern second person singular singis
was inherited unchanged from Common Germanic. The final t sound in Midland -est and
Southern -st was excrescent (added without any etymological reason), comparable with the
final t in modern amidst and amongst from older amiddes and amonges. The Northern third-
person singular singis had a quite different origin. Like the singis of the plural, it resulted
almost casually from an inadvertent retraction of the tongue in enunciation from an
interdental -th sound to postdental -s. In Modern English the form singeth survives as a
poetic archaism. Shakespeare used both -eth and -s endings (“It [mercy] blesseth him that
gives and him that takes,” The Merchant of Venice). The Midland present plural inflection -
en was taken from the subjunctive. The past participle prefix y- developed from the Old
English perfective prefix ge-.
Variations in verb inflections

Northern Midland Southern
infinitive sing singe(n) singen
present participle singand singende singinde
present singular
1st person singe singe singe
2nd person singis singes(t) singst
3rd person singis singeth-es singeth
present plural singis singen singeth

past participle sungen (y)sunge(n) ysunge
Chaucer, who was born and died in London, spoke a dialect that was basically East
Midland. Compared with his contemporaries, he was remarkably modern in his use of
language. He was in his early 20s when the Statute of Pleading (1362) was passed, by the
terms of which all court proceedings were henceforth to be conducted in English, though
“enrolled in Latin.” Chaucer himself used four languages; he read Latin (Classical and
Medieval) and spoke French and Italian on his travels. For his own literary work he
deliberately chose English.
Transition from Middle English to Early Modern English

The death of Chaucer at the close of the century (1400) marked the beginning of the period
of transition from Middle English to the Early Modern English stage. The Early Modern
English period is regarded by many scholars as beginning about 1500 and terminating with
the return of the monarchy (celebrated in John Dryden’s poem Astraea Redux) in 1660. The
three outstanding developments of the 15th century were the rise of London English, the
invention of printing, and the spread of the new learning associated with the Renaissance.
Although the population of London in 1400 was only about 40,000, it was by far the largest
city in England. York came second, followed by Bristol, Coventry, Plymouth, and Norwich.
The Midlands and East Anglia, the most densely peopled parts of England, supplied
London with streams of young immigrants. The speech of the capital was mixed, and it was
changing. The seven long vowels of Chaucer’s speech had already begun to shift. Incipient
diphthongization of high front /i:/ (the ee sound in meet) and high back /u:/ (as in fool) led
to instability in the other five long vowels. (Symbols within slash marks are taken from the
International Phonetic Alphabet.) This remarkable event, known as the Great Vowel Shift,
changed the whole vowel system of London English. As /i:/ and /u:/ became diphthongized
to /ai/ (as in bide) and /au/ (as in house) respectively, so the next highest vowels, /e:/ (this
sound can be heard in the first part of the diphthong in name) and /o:/ (a sound that can be
heard in the first part of the diphthong in home), moved up to take their places, and so on.
The table shows the vowel shift in London English; every one of the sounds appearing in
this table can still be heard somewhere in living English accents.
Vowel shifts in London English

Chaucer’s Chaucer’s Shakespeare’s present present
spelling pronunciation* pronunciation* pronunciation* spelling
lyf li:f leif laif life
deed de:d di:d di:d deed
deel dɛ:l de:l di:l deal
name na:mə** nɛ:m neim name
hoom hɔ:m ho:m houm home
mone mo:nə** mu:n mu:n moon
hous hu:s hous haus house
*Expressed in the International Phonetic Alphabet. **Two syllables.
When William Caxton started printing at Westminster

in the late summer of 1476, he was painfully aware of
the uncertain state of the English language. In his
prologues and epilogues to his translations, he made
some revealing observations on the problems that he
William Caxton's Cicero
Desenectute had encountered as translator and editor. At this time,
sentence structures were being gradually modified, but
many remained untidy. For the first time, nonprofessional scribes, including women, were
writing at length.
The revival of classical learning was one aspect of that Renaissance, or spiritual rebirth, that
arose in Italy and spread to France and England. It evoked a new interest in Greek on the
part of learned men such as William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, Sir Thomas More, and
Desiderius Erasmus. John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s in the first quarter of the 16th century,
startled his congregation by expounding the Pauline Epistles of the Christian New
Testament as living letters. The deans who had preceded him had known no Greek, because
they had found in Latin all that they required. Only a few medieval churchmen, such as
Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, and the Franciscan Roger Bacon, could read Greek
with ease. The names of the seven liberal arts of the medieval curricula (the trivium and the
quadrivium), it is true, were all Greek—grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, and music—but they had come into English by way of French.
Renaissance scholars adopted a liberal attitude to language. They borrowed Latin words
through French, or Latin words direct; Greek words through Latin, or Greek words direct.
Latin was no longer limited to Church Latin: it embraced all Classical Latin. For a time the
whole Latin lexicon became potentially English. Some words, such as consolation and
infidel, could have come from either French or Latin. Others, such as the terms abacus,
arbitrator, explicit, finis, gratis, imprimis, item, memento, memorandum, neuter, simile, and
videlicet, were taken straight from Latin. Words that had already entered the language
through French were now borrowed again, so that doublets arose: benison and benediction;
blame and blaspheme; chance and cadence; count and compute; dainty and dignity; frail
and fragile; poor and pauper; purvey and provide; ray and radius; sever and separate; strait
and strict; sure and secure. The Latin equivalents for kingly and lawful have even given rise
to triplets; in the forms real, royal, and regal and leal, loyal, and legal, they were imported
first from Anglo-Norman, then from Old French, and last from Latin direct.
After the dawn of the 16th century, English prose

moved swiftly toward modernity. In 1525 Lord
Berners completed his translation of Jean Froissart’s
Chronicle, and William Tyndale translated the New
Testament. One-third of the King James Bible (1611),
Isaac Newton: Opticks it has been computed, is worded exactly as Tyndale
left it, and between 1525 and 1611 lay the Tudor
Golden Age, with its culmination in William Shakespeare. Too many writers, to be sure,
used “inkhorn terms,” newly coined ephemeral words, and too many vacillated between
Latin and English. Sir Thomas More actually wrote his Utopia in Latin. It was translated
into French during his lifetime but not into English until 1551, some years after his death.
Francis Bacon published De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (On the Dignity and
Advancement of Learning, an expansion of his earlier Advancement of Learning) in Latin in
1623. William Harvey announced his epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the
blood in his Latin De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628; On the Motion of the
Heart and Blood in Animals). John Milton composed polemical treatises in the language of
Cicero. As Oliver Cromwell’s secretary, he corresponded in Latin with foreign states. His
younger contemporary Sir Isaac Newton lived long enough to bridge the gap. He wrote his
Principia (1687) in Latin but his Opticks (1704) in English.
Restoration period
With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, writers again looked to France. John Dryden
admired the Académie Française and greatly deplored that the English had “not so much as
a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous” as
compared with elegant French. After the passionate controversies of the Civil Wars, this
was an age of cool scientific nationalism. In 1662 the Royal Society of London for the
Promotion of Natural Knowledge received its charter. Its first members, much concerned
with language, appointed a committee of 22 “to improve the English tongue particularly for
philosophic purposes.” It included Dryden, the diarist John Evelyn, Bishop Thomas Sprat,
and the poet Edmund Waller. Sprat pleaded for “a close, naked, natural way of speaking;
positive expressions; clear senses, a native easiness; bringing all things as near the
mathematical plainness” as possible. The committee, however, achieved no tangible result,
and failed in its attempt to found an authoritative arbiter over the English tongue. A second
attempt was made in 1712, when Jonathan Swift addressed an open letter to Robert Harley,
earl of Oxford, then Lord Treasurer, making “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and
Ascertaining [fixing] the English Tongue.” This letter received some popular support, but
its aims were frustrated by a turn in political fortunes. Queen Anne died in 1714. Oxford
and his fellow Tories, including Swift, lost power. No organized attempt to found a
language academy on French lines has ever been made since.
With Dryden and Swift the English language reached its full maturity. Their failure to found
an academy was partly counterbalanced by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (published in

1755) and by Robert Lowth in his Grammar (published in 1761).
Age of Johnson
In the making of his Dictionary of the English
Language, Samuel Johnson took the best conversation
of contemporary London and the normal usage of
reputable writers after Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) as
his criteria. He exemplified the meanings of words by
Samuel Johnson's definition of illustrative quotations. Johnson admitted that “he had
“Oats” flattered himself for a while” with “the prospect of
fixing our language” but that thereby “he had indulged
expectation which neither reason nor experience could justify.” The two-folio work of 1755
was followed in 1756 by a shortened, one-volume version that was widely used for
centuries afterward. Revised and enlarged editions of the unabbreviated version were made
by Archdeacon Henry John Todd in 1818 and by Robert Gordon Latham in 1866.
It was unfortunate that Joseph Priestley, Robert Lowth, James Buchanan, and other 18th-
century grammarians (Priestley was perhaps better known as a scientist and theologian)
took a narrower view than Johnson on linguistic growth and development. They spent too
much time condemning such current “improprieties” as “I had rather not,” “you better go,”
“between you and I,” “it is me,” “who is this for?”, “between four walls,” “a third
alternative,” “the largest of the two,” “more perfect,” and “quite unique.” Without
explanatory comment they banned “you was” outright, although it was in widespread use
among educated people (on that ground it was later defended by Noah Webster). “You was”
had, in fact, taken the place of both “thou wast” and “thou wert” as a useful singular
equivalent of the accepted plural “you were.”
As the century wore on, grammarians became more numerous and aggressive. They set
themselves up as arbiters of correct usage. They compiled manuals that were not only
descriptive (stating what people do say) and prescriptive (stating what they should say) but
also proscriptive (stating what they should not say). They regarded Latin as a language
superior to English and claimed that Latin embodied universally valid canons of logic. This
view was well maintained by Lindley Murray, a native of Pennsylvania who settled in
England in the very year (1784) of Johnson’s death. Murray’s English Grammar appeared
in 1795, became immensely popular, and went into numerous editions. It was followed by
an English Reader (1799) and an English Spelling Book (1804), long favourite textbooks in
both Old and New England.
19th and 20th centuries

In 1857 Richard Chenevix Trench, dean of St. Paul’s, lectured to the Philological Society
on the theme, “On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries.” His proposals for a new
dictionary were implemented in 1859, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s grandnephew,
Herbert Coleridge, set to work as first editor. He was succeeded by a lawyer named
Frederick James Furnivall, who in 1864 founded the Early English Text Society with a view
to making all the earlier literature available to historical lexicographers in competent
editions. Furnivall was subsequently succeeded as editor by James A.H. Murray, who
published the first fascicle of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles in 1884.
Later Murray was joined successively by three editors: Henry Bradley, William Alexander
Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions. Aside from its Supplements, the completed dictionary
itself filled 12 volumes, had over 15,000 pages, contained 414,825 words, and was
illustrated by 1,827,306 citations. It sought to represent English in the British
Commonwealth and the United States—a fact symbolized by the presentation of first copies
in the spring of 1928 to King George V and President Calvin Coolidge—and to record the
histories and meanings of all words known to have been in use since 1150. From 1150 to
1500 all five Middle English dialects, as has been seen, were of equal status. They were
therefore all included. After 1500, however, dialectal expressions were not admitted, nor
were scientific and technical terms considered not to be in general use. Otherwise, the
written vocabulary is well represented. A revised edition of this dictionary, known as The
Oxford English Dictionary, was published in 1933, and a second edition was published in
1989. Online publication of the dictionary’s corpus enabled ongoing revision and
expansion.
Varieties of English
British English
The abbreviation RP (Received Pronunciation) denotes what is traditionally considered the
standard accent of people living in London and the southeast of England and of other
people elsewhere who speak in this way. RP is the only British accent that has no specific
geographical correlate: it is not possible, on hearing someone speak RP, to know which part
of the United Kingdom he or she comes from. Though it is traditionally considered a
“prestige” accent, RP is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English; it is itself
only one particular accent that has, through the accidents of history, achieved a higher status
than others. Although acquiring its unique standing without the aid of any established
authority, it was fostered by the public schools (Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and so
on) and the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Other varieties of English are
well preserved in spite of the leveling influences of film, television, and radio. In several
Northern accents, RP /a:/ (the first vowel sound in father) is still pronounced /æ/ (a sound
like the a in fat) in words such as laugh, fast, and path; this pronunciation has been carried
across the Atlantic into American English.
In the words run, rung, and tongue, the RP pronunciation of the vowel is like the u in but;
in some Northern accents it is pronounced like the oo in book. In the words bind, find, and
grind, the RP pronunciation of the vowel sound is /ai/, like that in “bide”; in some Northern
accents, it is /i/, like the sound in feet. The vowel sound in the words go, home, and know in
some Northern accents is /ɔ:/, approximately the sound in law in some American English
accents. In parts of Northumberland, RP it is still pronounced “hit,” as in Old English. In
various Northern accents the definite article the is heard as t, th, or d. In those accents in
which it becomes both t and th, t is used before consonants and th before vowels. Thus, one
hears t’book but th’apple. When, however, the definite article is reduced to t and the
following word begins with t or d, as in t’tail or t’dog, it is replaced by a slight pause as in
the RP articulation of the first t in hat trick. The RP /t∫/, the sound of the ch in church, can
become k, as in thack (“thatch, roof”) and kirk (“church”). In some Northern dialects strong
verbs retain the old past-tense singular forms band, brak, fand, spak for standard English
forms bound, broke, found, and spoke. Strong verbs also retain the past participle inflection
-en as in comen, shutten, sitten, and getten or gotten for standard English come, shut, sat,
and got.
In some Midland accents the diphthongs in throat and stone have been kept apart, whereas
in RP they have fallen together. In Cheshire, Derby, Stafford, and Warwick, RP singing is
pronounced with a g sounded after the velar nasal sound (as in RP finger). In Norfolk one
hears skellington and solintary for skeleton and solitary, showing an intrusive n just as does
messenger in RP from French messager, passenger from French passager, and nightingale
from Old English nihtegala. Other East Anglian words show consonantal metathesis
(switch position), as in singify for signify, and substitution of one liquid or nasal for another,
as in chimbly for chimney and synnable for syllable. Hantle for handful shows syncope
(disappearance) of an unstressed vowel, partial assimilation of d to t before voiceless f, and
subsequent loss of f in a triple consonant group.
In some South Western accents, initial f and s are often voiced, becoming v and z. Two
words with initial v have found their way into RP: vat from fat and vixen from fixen (female
fox). Another South Western feature is the development of a d between l or n and r, as in
parlder for parlour and carnder for corner. The bilabial semivowel w has developed before
o in wold for old, and in wom for home, illustrating a similar development in RP by which
Old English ān has become one, and Old English hāl has come to be spelled whole, as
compared with Northern hale. In some South Western accents yat comes from the old
singular geat, whereas RP gate comes from the plural gatu. Likewise, clee comes from the
old nominative clea, whereas RP claw comes from the oblique cases. The verbs keel and
kemb have developed regularly from Old English cēlan “to make cool” and kemban “to use
a comb,” whereas the corresponding RP verbs cool and comb come from the adjective and
the noun, respectively.
In Wales, people often speak a clear and measured form of English with rising intonations
inherited from ancestral Celtic. They tend to aspirate both plosives (stops) and fricative
consonants very forcibly; thus, two is pronounced with an audible puff of breath after the
initial t, and while may be heard with a voiceless /w/.
Scots, or Lowland Scottish, was once a part of Northern English, but the two dialects began
to diverge in the 14th century. Today speakers of Scots trill their r’s, shorten vowels, and
simplify diphthongs. A few Scots words, such as bairn, brae, canny, dour, and pawky, have
made their way into RP. Scots is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language
still spoken by about 60,000 people (almost all bilingual) mostly in the Highlands and the
Western Isles. Thanks to such writers as Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, many Scottish
Gaelic words have been preserved in English literature.
Northern Ireland has dialects related in part to Scots and in part to the southern Irish dialect
of English. The influence of the Irish language on the speech of Dublin is most evident in
the syntax of drama and in the survival of such picturesque expressions as We are after
finishing, It’s sorry you will be, and James do be cutting corn every day.
American and Canadian English

The dialect regions of the United States are most
clearly marked along the Atlantic littoral, where the
earlier settlements were made. Three dialects can be
defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Each has
its subdialects.
American English dialects
The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its
six chief subdialects comprise northeastern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and
eastern Vermont), southeastern New England (eastern Massachusetts, eastern Connecticut,
and Rhode Island), southwestern New England (western Massachusetts and western
Connecticut), the inland north (western Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson
Valley, and metropolitan New York.
The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in New Jersey, to
Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major subdialects comprise the Delaware Valley, the
Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley, northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac
and Shenandoah, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina and
South Carolina, and eastern Tennessee.
The Southern dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to South Carolina. Its
five chief subdialects comprise the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont,
northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee
valleys, and the South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.
These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada,
are highly tentative. To some extent these regions preserve the traditional speech of
southeastern and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first
settlers to arrive in Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old
words to new uses, but they were content to borrow names from the local Indian languages
for unknown trees, such as hickory and persimmon and for unfamiliar animals, such as
raccoon and woodchuck. Later they took words from foreign settlers: chowder and prairie
from the French, scow and sleigh from the Dutch. They made new compounds, such as
backwoods and bullfrog, and gave new meanings to such words as lumber (which in British
English denotes disused furniture, or junk) and corn (which in British English signifies any
grain, especially wheat) to mean “maize.”
Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the immigrants had come
from England, but after that date they arrived in large numbers from Ireland. The Great
Famine of 1845–49 drove 1.5 million Irish to seek homes in the New World, and the
European revolutions of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the
Midwest. After the close of the American Civil War, millions of Scandinavians, Slavs, and
Italians crossed the ocean and eventually settled mostly in the North Central and Upper
Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved Africans working
on rice and cotton plantations developed a contact language called Gullah, or Geechee, that
made use of many structural and lexical features of their native languages. This variety of
English is comparable to such contact languages as Sranan (Taki-taki) of Suriname and
Melanesian Pidgins. The speech of the Atlantic Seaboard shows far greater differences in
pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than that of any area in the North Central states,
the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick
transport, and television have tended to level out some dialectal differences in the United
States. On the other hand, immigrant groups have introduced new varieties in which the
influence of ethnic origins is evident, and some immigrant languages are widely spoken
(notably Spanish, in the southeastern and southwestern states).
The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to

any boundary between dialects, and the influence of
United States English is strong, being felt least in the
Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Nevertheless, in spite of the effect of this proximity to
distribution of majority the United States, British influences are still potent in
Anglophone and Francophone some of the larger cities; Scottish influences are well
populations in Canada
sustained in Ontario. Canada remains bilingual. Less
than one-fourth of its people, living mostly in the
province of Quebec, have French as their mother tongue.
Australian and New Zealand English

Unlike Canada, Australia has no concentration of a European language other than English
within its borders. There are still many Aboriginal languages, though they each are spoken
by small numbers and their continued existence is threatened. More than 80 percent of the
population is of British descent, but significant growth in the numbers of immigrants,
especially from Europe and the Pacific Rim countries, took place in the last quarter of the
20th century.
During colonial times the new settlers had to find names for fauna and flora (e.g., banksia,
iron bark, whee whee) different from anything previously known to them: trees that shed
bark instead of leaves and cherries with external stones. The words brush, bush, creek,
paddock, and scrub acquired wider senses, whereas the terms brook, dale, field, forest, and
meadow were seldom used. A creek leading out of a river and entering it again downstream
was called an anastomizing branch (a term from anatomy), or an anabranch, whereas a
creek coming to a dead end was called by its native name, a billabong. The giant kingfisher
with its raucous bray was long referred to as a laughing jackass, later as a bushman’s clock,
but now it is a kookaburra. Cattle so intractable that only roping could control them were
said to be ropable, a term now used as a synonym for “angry” or “extremely annoyed.”
A deadbeat was a penniless “sundowner” at the very end of his tether, and a no-hoper was
an incompetent fellow, hopeless and helpless. An offsider (strictly, the offside driver of a
bullock team) was any assistant or partner. A rouseabout was first an odd-job man on a
sheep station and then any kind of handyman. He was, in fact, the “down-under”
counterpart of the wharf labourer, or roustabout, on the Mississippi River. Both words
originated in Cornwall, and many other terms, now exclusively Australian, came ultimately
from British dialects. Dinkum, for instance, meaning “true, authentic, genuine,” echoed the
fair dinkum, or fair deal, of Lincolnshire dialect. Fossicking about for surface gold, and
then rummaging about in general, perpetuated the term fossick (“to elicit information, ferret
out the facts”) from the Cornish dialect of English. To barrack, or “jeer noisily,” recalled
Irish barrack (“to brag, boast”), whereas skerrick in the phrase not a skerrick left was
obviously identical with the skerrick meaning “small fragment, particle,” still heard in
English dialects from Westmorland to Hampshire.
Some Australian English terms came from Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander
peoples: the words boomerang, corroboree (warlike dance and then any large and noisy
gathering), dingo (reddish brown wild dog), galah (cockatoo), gunyah (bush hut),
kangaroo, karri (dark red eucalyptus tree), nonda (rosaceous tree yielding edible fruit),
wallaby (small marsupial), and wallaroo (large rock kangaroo). Although there is
remarkably little regional variation in pronunciation throughout the entire continent, there is
significant social variation. The neutral vowel /ə/ (as the a in sofa) is frequently used, as in
London Cockney: arches and archers are both pronounced [a:t∫əz], and the pronunciations
of the diphthongs in RP day and go are more like (RP) die and now.
Although New Zealand lies over 1,000 miles away, much of the English spoken there is
similar to that of Australia. The blanket term Austral English is sometimes used to cover the
language of the whole of Australasia, but this term is far from popular with New Zealanders
because it makes no reference to New Zealand and gives all the prominence, so they feel, to
Australia. Between North and South Islands there are observable differences. In particular,
Maori, which remains a living language (related to Tahitian, Hawaiian, and the other
Austronesian [Malayo-Polynesian] languages), has a greater number of speakers and more
influence in North Island.
South Asian English

In 1950 India became a federal republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, and Hindi
was declared the first national language. English, it was stated, would “continue to be used
for all official purposes until 1965.” In 1967, however, by the terms of the English
Language Amendment Bill, English was proclaimed “an alternative official or associate
language with Hindi until such time as all non-Hindi states had agreed to its being
dropped.” English is therefore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the only practicable
means of day-to-day communication between the central government at New Delhi and
states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or “South,” where
millions speak Dravidian (non-Indo-European) languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and
Malayalam. English is widely used in business, in higher education, and in scientific
research.
In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic comprising two states, East and West.
Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and West Pakistan,
respectively, but English was adopted as a third official language and functioned as the
medium of interstate communication. (In 1971 East Pakistan broke away from its western
partner and became the independent state of Bangladesh.) English is also widely used in Sri
Lanka and Nepal.
African English
Africa is one of the world’s most multilingual areas, if people are measured against
languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly changing
superstructure of world languages (Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese). The problems
of language are everywhere linked with political, social, economic, and educational factors.
The Republic of South Africa, the oldest British settlement in the continent, resembles
Canada in having two recognized European languages within its borders: English and
Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders followed in the wake of 15th-
century Portuguese explorers and have lived in widely varying war-and-peace relationships
ever since. Although the Union of South Africa, comprising Cape Province, Transvaal,
Natal, and Orange Free State, was for more than a half century (1910–61) a member of the
British Empire and Commonwealth, its four prime ministers (Louis Botha, Jan Smuts,
J.B.M. Hertzog, and Daniel F. Malan) were all Dutchmen. The Afrikaans language began to
diverge seriously from European Dutch in the late 18th century and gradually came to be
recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in South Africa differs in
some respects from standard British English, its speakers do not regard the language as a
separate one. They have naturally come to use many Afrikanerisms, such as kloof, kopje,
krans, veld, and vlei, to denote features of the landscape and employ African names to
designate local animals, plants, and social and political concepts. South Africa’s 1996
constitution identified 11 official languages, English among them. The words trek and
commando, notorious in South African history, are among several that have entered world
standard English.
Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider communication. It

functions as an official language of administration in, and is an official language of,
numerous countries, all of them multilingual. Liberia is among the African countries with
the deepest historical ties to English—the population most associated with the country’s
founding migrated from the United States during the 19th century—but English is just one
of more than two dozen languages spoken there by multiple ethnic groups. English’s place
within that linguistic diversity is representative of English in Africa as a whole.
Simeon Potter David Crystal The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: English language
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 14 July 2023
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/topic/English-language
Access Date: August 21, 2023

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English language -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 8/21/23, 6:36 PM

(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)

Origins and basic characteristics

descended from this ancestral speech, is usually

Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the

Characteristics of Modern English

The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, θ

Back-formations, blends, and other types of word-formation

Simple sentences—first pattern

Simple sentences—second pattern

Simple sentences—second pattern

In spite of its etymology (Latin prae-positio “before placing”), a preposition may

Equivalent compounds and derivatives*

Tamil—pariah, curry, catamaran, mulligatawny

Welsh—flannel, coracle, cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod

Cornish—gull, brill, dolmen

Turkish—janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk, caviar, pasha, odalisque, fez, bosh

Chinese—tea (Amoy), sampan, ketchup

Polynesian—taboo (Tongan), tattoo (Tahitian)

Inuit—kayak, igloo, anorak

Taino—hammock, hurricane, tobacco, maize

Arawak and Carib—iguana

Portuguese—marmalade, flamingo, molasses, veranda, port (wine), dodo

English spelling is based for the most part on that of

The River Humber was an important boundary, and

iċ “I” wit “we two” wē “we”

or less on a level. West Saxon lost its supremacy, and

Variations in verb inflections

present plural singis singen singeth

Transition from Middle English to Early Modern English

Vowel shifts in London English

When William Caxton started printing at Westminster

After the dawn of the 16th century, English prose

an academy was partly counterbalanced by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (published in

19th and 20th centuries

American and Canadian English

The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to

Australian and New Zealand English

South Asian English

Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider communication. It

within that linguistic diversity is representative of English in Africa as a whole.

Simeon Potter David Crystal The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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