English language,West Germanic language of theIndo-European language family that is closely related toFrisian,German, andDutch (in Belgium called Flemish) languages. English originated inEngland and is the dominant language of theUnited States, theUnited Kingdom,Canada,Australia,Ireland,New Zealand, and various island nations in theCaribbean Sea and thePacific Ocean. It is also an official language ofIndia, thePhilippines,Singapore, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, includingSouth 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 globallingua franca. It is estimated that about a third of the world’s population, some two billion persons, now use English.

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biblical literature: Later and modern versions: English

Knowledge of the pre-Wycliffite English renditions stems from the many actual manuscripts that have survived and from secondary literature,…

Origins and basic characteristics

English belongs to theIndo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken inEurope and westernAsia fromIceland toIndia. 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 descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups:East (Burgundian, Vandal, andGothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic,Faroese,Norwegian,Swedish, andDanish), andWest (German,Dutch [and Flemish],Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far moreconservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system ofinflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province ofFriesland and the islands off the west coast ofSchleswig, 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 resemblingOld English in grammatical structure.

Modern English isanalytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), wassynthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found inSanskrit,Greek,Latin,Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as inChinese andVietnamese. The German and Chinese words for the nounman areexemplary. 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 inhe, him, his), adjectives (as inbig, 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 Spanishel hombre alto andla mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English wordride 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 Englishridan had 13, and Modern Germanreiten 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 ofinflections. 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, ofplanning a table ortabling a plan,booking a place orplacing a book,lifting a thumb orthumbing a lift. In the otherIndo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions inScandinavian 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 theFrankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix-er to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as acompound,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 asadjunct (modifier), as inwages board andsports editor; or even a conjunctional group, as inprices and incomes policy andparks 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 otherlanguages and the ready creation ofcompounds 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 itssounds andgrammar, the bulk of English vocabulary is in factRomance or Classical in origin.

English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the pronunciation of words;see belowOrthography.