What English is, in short
English is a West Germanic language that began in early medieval England and is now the most widely spoken language in the world when native and second-language speakers are counted together, about 1.5 billion people. Its grammar is Germanic, close to Frisian, Dutch and German, but most of its dictionary came from French and Latin.
That double inheritance explains a lot of what follows: three words for one idea, spellings that don't match sounds, and a vocabulary larger than most languages'.
- Family
- Indo-European › Germanic › West Germanic
- Speakers
- ~380 million native, ~1.5 billion in total
- Official in
- More than 50 countries
- Alphabet
- 26 Latin letters (Old English also had þ, ð, æ, ƿ)
Three languages in one sentence
How tenses place events in time
English marks time with tense (past or present) and aspect: whether an action is complete, ongoing or connected to now. Pick a form.
Six words, one spelling, six sounds
Spelling was fixed by printers around 1500, just as the Great Vowel Shift was changing how words were said. The letters stayed; the sounds moved. Match each -ough word to the word it rhymes with.
The same day, told three ways
Why the world learns it
Further reading and practice
Four books that cover the history, the grammar and the oddities, plus places to test yourself.