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English Link/ resources online 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 English
language English is currently one of the most widely spoken and written languages worldwide, with some 380 million native speakers. Only Chinese and Hindi have more native speakers while Spanish is similar in number. English is also the dominant member of the Germanic languages. It has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the Second World War to the present. Through the global influence of native English speakers in cinema, music, broadcasting, science, and the Internet in recent decades, English is now the most widely learned second language in the world. Because a working knowledge of English is required in many fields and occupations, education ministries around the world mandate the teaching of English to at least a basic level (see English as an additional language) .
While modern scholarship considers most of the story to be legendary and politically motivated, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported that around the year 449, Vortigern, King of the British Isles, invited the Angles to help him against the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the south-east and far north of England. Further aid was sought, and in response came Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms. These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived largely in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what would be called Old English, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now north-west Germany and the Netherlands. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north-east (see Jórvík). For the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only Anglo-Norman. A large number of Norman words were assimilated into Old English. The Norman influence reinforced the continual evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English. During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare.
After Scots, the next closest relative is Frisian—spoken in the Netherlands and Germany. Other less closely related living languages include German, Low German, Dutch, Scandinavian languages and Afrikaans. Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (pronunciations are not always identical, of course) because English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from French, via the Norman language after the Norman conquest and directly from French in further centuries; as a result, a substantial share of English vocabulary is quite close to the French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings etc.), as well as occasional differences in meaning.
English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados (Caribbean English), Bermuda, Belize, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Guyana, Isle of Man, Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Ireland (Hiberno-English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom (various forms of British English), the U.S. Virgin Islands and the United States (various forms of American English) English is also an important minority language of South Africa (South African English), and in several other former colonies and current dependent territories of the United Kingdom and the United States, for example Singapore and Mauritius. In Asia, former British colonies like Singapore and Malaysia use English as their official language, and is taught in all private and public schools as a mandatory subject. There is a considerable number of native English speakers in urban areas in both countries. In Hong Kong, English is co-official with Chinese, and is widely used in business activities. It is taught from infant school and kindergarten, and is the medium of instruction for a few primary schools, many secondary schools and all universities. Substantial numbers of students acquire native-speaker level. It is so widely used that it is inadequate to say that it is merely a second or foreign language, though there is still a huge percentage of people in Hong Kong with poor or no command of English at all. The majority of English native speakers (67 to 70 per cent) live in the United States (Crystal, 1997). Although the U.S. federal government has no official languages, English has been given official status by 27 of the 50 state governments, most of which have declared English their sole official language. Hawaii, Louisiana, and New Mexico have also designated Hawaiian, French, and Spanish, respectively, as official languages in conjunction with English. In many other countries, where English is not a major first language, it is an official language; these countries include Cameroon, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Ghana, Gambia, India, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. English is the most widely learned and used foreign language in the world, and as such, some linguists believe that it is no longer the exclusive cultural emblem of 'native English speakers', but rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures world-wide as it grows in use. Others believe that there are limits to how far English can go in suiting everyone for communication purposes. English is the language most often studied as a foreign language in the European Union (by 89% of schoolchildren), followed by French (32%), German (18%), and Spanish (8%).[1] It is also the most studied in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. English is also compulsory for most secondary school students in China and Taiwan. See English as an additional language.
Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "global language". While English is not an official language in many countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a second language around the world. It is also, by international treaty, the official language for aircraft/airport and maritime communication, as well as being one of the official languages of both the European Union and the United Nations, and of most international athletic organizations, including the Olympic Committee.
English dialects
The major varieties of English in most cases contain several subvarieties, such as Cockney slang within British English, Newfoundland English, and the English spoken by Anglo-Québecers within Canadian English, and African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics") within American English. English is considered a pluricentric language, with no variety being clearly considered the only standard. The Scots language developed largely separately from the same origins, but following the Acts of Union 1707 usage converged and whether it is a language in its own right or an English dialect better described as Scottish English is disputed. Pronunciation, grammar and lexis differ, sometimes substantially. Because of English's wide use as a second language, English speakers can have many different accents, which may identify the speaker's native dialect or language. For more distinctive characteristics of regional accents, see Regional accents of English speakers. For more distinctive characteristics of regional dialects, see List of dialects of the English language. Just as English itself has borrowed words from many different languages over its history, English loanwords now appear in a great many languages around the world, indicative of the technological and cultural influence wielded by English speakers. Several pidgins and creole languages have formed on an English base - Tok Pisin was originally one such example. There are a number of words in English coined to describe forms of particular non-English languages that contain a very high proportion of English words - Franglais, for example, is used to describe French with a very high English content (spoken mostly in the border bilingual regions of Québec).
Notes: It is the vowels that differ most from region to region. Where symbols appear in pairs, the first corresponds to the sounds used in North American English, the second corresponds to English spoken elsewhere. North American
English lacks this sound; words with this sound are pronounced with /?/
or /?/. According to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998), this sound
is present in Standard Canadian English. Voiceless
plosives and affricates (/p/, /t/, /k/, and /t?/) are aspirated when they
are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable Supra-segmental
features In English, intonation patterns are on groups of words, which are called tone groups, tone units, intonation groups or sense groups. Tone groups are said on a single breath and, as a consequence, are of limited length, more often being on average five words long or lasting roughly two seconds. The structure of tone groups can have a crucial impact on the meaning of what is said.
Hence in a sentence, each tone group can be subdivided into syllables, which can either be stressed (strong) or unstressed (weak). The stressed syllable is called the nuclear syllable. For example: That | was
| the | best | thing | you | could | have | done! The nuclear syllable carries the main point the speaker wishes to make. For example: John hadn't
stolen that money. (... Someone else had.) I didn't
tell her that. (... Someone else told her.) When do you
want to be paid? At the same time as inflection has declined in importance in English, the language has developed a greater reliance on features such as modal verbs and word order to convey grammatical information. Auxiliary verbs are used to mark constructions such as questions, negatives, the passive voice and progressive tenses.
An English speaker is often able to choose between Germanic and Latinate synonyms: "come" or "arrive"; "sight" or "vision"; "freedom" or "liberty" — and sometimes also between a word inherited through French and a borrowing direct from Latin of the same root word: "oversee", "survey" or "supervise". The richness of the language arises from the variety of different meanings and nuances such synonyms have from each other, enabling the language to be used in a very flexible way to express fine variations or shades of thought. See: List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents. An exception to this and a peculiarity arguably unique to English is that the nouns for meats are commonly different from, and unrelated to, those for the animals from which they are produced, the animal commonly having a Germanic name and the meat having a French derived noun. Examples include: deer and venison; cow and beef; or swine/pig and pork. This is assumed to be a result of the aftermath of the Norman invasion, where a French speaking elite were the consumers of the meat, produced by English speaking lower classes. In everyday speech, the majority of words will normally be Germanic. If a speaker wishes to make a forceful point in an argument in a very blunt way, Germanic words will usually be chosen. A majority of Latinate words (or at least a majority of content words) will normally be used in more formal speech and writing, such as a courtroom or an encyclopedia article. English is noted for the vast size of its active vocabulary and its fluidity. English easily accepts technical terms into common usage and imports new words and phrases which often come into common usage. Examples of this phenomenon include: cookie, internet and URL (technical terms), as well as genre, über, lingua franca and amigo (imported words/phrases, from French, German, modern Latin, and Spanish, respectively). In addition, slang often provides new meanings for old words and phrases. In fact, this fluidity is so pronounced that a distinction often needs to be made between formal forms of English and contemporary usage. See also: sociolinguistics.
The Vocabulary
of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed
quantity circumscribed by definite limits ... there is absolutely no defining
line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined
centre but no discernible circumference. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) includes over 500,000 headwords, following a rather inclusive policy: It embraces
not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether
current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical
vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang (Supplement
to the OED, 1933).
A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973) which estimated the origin of English words as follows: French, including
Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
Some examples: ångström, animé, appliqué, attaché, blasé, bric-à-brac, café, cliché, crème, crêpe, façade, fiancé(e), flambé, naïve, né(e), papier-mâché, passé, piñata, protégé, raison d'être, résumé, risqué, über-, vis-à-vis, voilà. For a more complete list, see List of English words with diacritics. Some words such as rôle and hôtel were first seen with accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accent is almost never used. The words were considered very French borrowings when first used in English, even accused by some of being foreign phrases used where English alternatives would suffice, but today their French origin is largely forgotten. The accent on "élite" has disappeared from most publications today, though Time magazine still uses it. For some words such as "soupçon" however, the only spelling found in English dictionaries (the OED and others) uses the diacritic. Italics, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, adiós, coup d'état, crème brûlée, pièce de résistance, raison d'être, über (übermensch), vis-à-vis. It was formerly common in English to use a diaeresis to indicate a syllable break; for example, coöperate, daïs, reëlect. One publication that still uses a diaeresis for this function is the New Yorker magazine. However, this is increasingly rare in modern English. Nowadays the diaeresis is normally left out (cooperate), or a hyphen is used (co-operate). It is, however, still common in loanwords such as naïve and noël. Written accents are also used occasionally in poetry and scripts for dramatic performances to indicate that a certain normally unstressed syllable in a word should be stressed for dramatic effect, or to keep with the meter of the poetry. This use is frequently seen in archaic and pseudoarchaic writings with the "-ed" suffix, to indicate that the "e" should be fully pronounced, as with cursèd. In certain older texts (typically British), the use of ligatures is common in words such as archæology, œsophagus, and encyclopædia. Such words have Latin or Greek origin. Nowadays, the ligatures have been generally replaced in Commonwealth English by the separated letters "ae" and "oe" ("archaeology", "oesophagus") and in American English by "ae" and "e" ("archaeology", "esophagus"), however, the spellings "oeconomy" and "oecology" are now generally replaced by "economy" and "ecology" outside the U.S as well. For further information on how one can type diacritics and ligatures, see British and American keyboards, keyboard layouts.
Learners of English are in danger of being misled by native speakers who refer to American English, Australian English, British English or other varieties of English. While it is true that many regional differences between the forms of spoken English can be documented, the learner can easily fall into the trap of believing that these are different languages. They are instead mostly regional variations of the spoken language and such variations occur within these countries as well as between them. The differences in formal writing that occur in the various parts of the English-speaking world are so slight that many dozens of pages of formal English can be read without the reader coming across any clues as to the origin of the writer, far less any difficulties of comprehension. A popular American website about errors in English, written by a professor at a west coast U.S. university guiding his students towards preferred constructions of written English, contains almost nothing among its hundreds of entries with which a counterpart thousands of miles away in Sydney or London would disagree. Certainly, disputes about pronunciation and colloquial expressions used in speech abound. But in the written language these are relatively few.
Ogden did not put any words into Basic English that could be said with a few other words, and he worked to make the words work for speakers of any other language. He put his set of words through a large number of tests and adjustments. He also made the grammar simpler, but tried to keep the grammar normal for English users. The concept gained its greatest publicity just after the Second World War as a tool for world peace. Although it was not built into a program, similar simplifications were devised for various international uses. Another version, Simplified English, exist, which is a controlled language originally developed for aerospace industry maintenance manuals. It offers a carefully limited and standardized subset of English. Simplified English has a lexicon of approved words and those words can only be used in certain ways. For example, the word close can be used in the phrase "Close the door" but not "do not go close to the landing gear". English
studies More broadly, English studies explores the production and analysis of texts produced in English (or in areas of the world in which English is a common mode of communication). It's not uncommon for academic departments of "English Studies" to include scholars of the English language, the philosophy of language, literature, linguistics, law, journalism, composition studies, literacy, film studies, communication studies, technical communication, folklore, cultural studies, creative writing, critical theory, disability studies, area studies, theatre, gender studies, digital media, new media studies, and rhetoric, among others. In most English-speaking
countries, English studies is practiced in university departments of English,
while the study of texts produced in non-English languages takes place
in other departments, and such as departments foreign language or comparative
literature. This disciplinary divide is one motivation for the division
of the North American Modern Language Association (MLA) into two principal
subgroups, the Association of Departments of English (ADE) and the Association
of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL). Formal written
English Learners of English are in danger of being misled by native speakers who refer to American English, Australian English, British English or other varieties of English. While it is true that many regional differences between the forms of spoken English can be documented, the learner can easily fall into the trap of believing that these are different languages. They are instead mostly regional variations of the spoken language and such variations occur within these countries as well as between them. The differences in formal writing that occur in the various parts of the English-speaking world are so slight that many dozens of pages of formal English can be read without the reader coming across any clues as to the origin of the writer, far less any difficulties of comprehension. A popular American website about errors in English, written by a professor at a west coast U.S. university guiding his students towards preferred constructions of written English, contains almost nothing among its hundreds of entries with which a counterpart thousands of miles away in Sydney or London would disagree. Certainly, disputes about pronunciation and colloquial expressions used in speech abound. But in the written language these are relatively few. A supporter of the view that there is an Australian written English, for example, and an American written English may counter that many examples appear in the lists of differences below. But to put this in perspective, the Oxford English Dictionary contains around 500,000 entries. And among the differences in regional usage that do occur, the majority are specialized or regional words which appear quite rarely in formal writing. Differences in spelling such as "color" and "colour" arise more frequently, depending on the subject matter, but these cause no difficulty in comprehension. (Indeed, such spellings are sometimes used on purpose outside their home country in the marketing of products in order to convey some sense of exotic provenance!) The scientific world has already taken advantage of the fact that there is just one version of English in formal written communication by making it the common language of scientific reports. Very occasional conflicts of spelling in this area have prompted formal decisions on which word or spelling to use. Committees have ruled, for example, that in scientific writing it is "sulfur" not the British "sulphur" and "aluminium" not the U.S. spelling "aluminum". But the number of such rulings is insignificant in the context of a vocabulary of half a million words. English speakers, after all, share a common linguistic heritage. Shakespeare's writing predates the establishment of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom. Successful novels of the mid-19th century such as The Moonstone by the British Wilkie Collins, or Uncle Tom's Cabin by the American Harriet Beecher Stowe were published simultaneously in Britain and America without any thought that one or other audience would have any difficulty in understanding the writing of someone from another country. Equally, 150 years later, The Economist newspaper is published in London but sells more than half its printed copies in North America. Although the regional variations in written English may be slight, the spoken language is another matter. But even here the broad geographical distinctions often used may sometimes have more to do with nationalistic sentiments than rigorous study of the objective facts. Speakers of General American and the British Received Pronunciation may find no difficulty in understanding each other's accents as a result of long exposure in the media, aided by the clarity of pronunciation that is a feature of both these accents. Yet, both may struggle to understand a broad accent from Glasgow, Scotland, or from rural Tennessee, or from Cornwall, a county in the southwest of England, or from the south side of Chicago, Illinois. By contrast, the Cornish accent may be easily understood by the inhabitants of the islands off North Carolina, where the accents are still little changed from their Cornish forebears. Equally, the accent of some parts of Ottawa, the capital of Canada, is virtually indistinguishable to an outsider from the accent of parts of Northern Ireland. Under the weight of such evidence, the generalization that there is a single British accent or a single American accent begins to become unsustainable.
Lists of differences in spoken English, as well as most English dictionaries, mark words as colloquial, slang, vulgar and so on to guide the speaker on when it may be inappropriate to use certain words. This list does not include such distinctions because, describing only formal written English, it excludes these categories of words. Equally, the lists below do not include words with which people in one or another country would simply be unfamiliar. The average speaker has a vocabulary of around 8,000 words. There are many words he or she has not yet come across and dictionaries are available to provide these meanings. To qualify for inclusion a word or structure must be widely familiar in more than one country and yet have different meanings in different countries when used in formal written English. Lastly, regional differences in punctuation are not included as they are dealt with in other articles. Country abbreviations used in the lists are: AU Australia
This list includes such words as "pavement" because this word means the paved area at the side of a road set aside for pedestrians in British usage but the paved surface of a road in U.S. usage. The list does not, however, include "sidewalk" because this has the same meaning in both U.S. and British usage. The distinction is that although "sidewalk" is generally understood in Britain it is almost never used since the word "pavement" is the usual term. A non-native learner of English might therefore decide always to use the word "sidewalk" to avoid being misunderstood in different parts of the world. Expression
Meaning in countries listed Meaning in countries listed Construction
Meaning in countries listed Meaning in countries listed This could cause confusion as the statement of an American that "I spit on the ground," referring to an action undertaken in the past could be confused by an Australian as use of the perfect present tense to state an implied fact.
Spelling
in countries listed Spelling in countries listed Spelling in countries
listed
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