More Learners Than Native Speakers
English is the most spoken language in the world, yet it is only the third most common native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. The gap is filled by learners: English is the most widely studied second language on Earth and has more second-language speakers than native ones. Ethnologue estimated over 1.4 billion speakers in 2021.
Its spread came mainly from the global reach of the British Empire and then the rise of the United States. English is an official language in 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language in the world.
It has also become the working lingua franca of diplomacy, science, technology, trade, aviation, entertainment and the internet. Oddly, in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia it is dominant for historical reasons without being explicitly made official by law.
Named After a Tribe
English is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after Roman rule ended. It is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European family.
Its earliest form, Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, was spoken from about 450 to 1150. It grew from West Germanic dialects brought by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes from the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony and southern Jutland.
The first English was not even written in the alphabet you are reading now. Early inscriptions used runes, and a Latin-based alphabet was adopted only for longer texts. Late Old English also borrowed grammar and core vocabulary from Old Norse, the North Germanic language of Scandinavian settlers. By the High Middle Ages, the English alphabet had fully replaced the runic one.
The French and Latin Makeover
Then came the Normans. Under Norman control, Old English gave way to Middle English, which borrowed vocabulary on a massive scale. French dialects are the source of roughly 28% of Modern English words, and Latin supplies about another 28%.
That means most of the English vocabulary, taken as a whole, comes from Latin and the Romance languages. Yet the core of the language never changed sides. Its grammar and phonology remain Germanic, and so do most of its basic everyday words.
Middle English then transformed, partly through the Great Vowel Shift, into Modern English. Today English sits on a dialect continuum with Scots, and its next closest relatives are Low Saxon and Frisian.
A Germanic Language That Drifted Away
English shares a common ancestor, Proto-Germanic, with Dutch, German and Swedish. That shared origin shows in their family traits: verbs split into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs like can and must, and old sound changes known as Grimm's and Verner's laws.
But English spent centuries cut off from its continental cousins, and it drifted a long way in vocabulary, sentence structure and sound. Today it is not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic language, although Dutch and Frisian share strong similarities with it, especially in its earlier stages.
English also has children of its own. Particular dialects of Old and Middle English developed into other Anglic languages, including Scots and the now extinct Fingallian and Yola dialects of Ireland.
