English language

English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain after its Roman occupiers left. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire and the United States. English is the third-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish; it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers.

English is either the official language or one of the official languages in 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language in the world. In the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, it is the dominant language for historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law. It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other international and regional organisations. It has also become the de facto lingua franca of diplomacy, science, technology, international trade, logistics, tourism, aviation, entertainment, and the Internet. English accounts for at least 70 percent of total native speakers of the Germanic languages, and Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.4 billion speakers worldwide as of 2021.

Old English emerged from a group of West Germanic dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Late Old English borrowed some grammar and core vocabulary from Old Norse, a North Germanic language. Then, Middle English borrowed vocabulary extensively from French dialects, which are the source of approximately 28 percent of Modern English words, and from Latin, which is the source of an additional 28 percent. While Latin and the Romance languages are thus the source for a majority of its lexicon taken as a whole, English grammar and phonology retain a family resemblance with the Germanic languages, and most of its basic everyday vocabulary remains Germanic in origin. English exists on a dialect continuum with Scots; it is next-most closely related to Low Saxon and Frisian.

English is a member of the Indo-European language family and belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. Old English was one of several languages that emerged from a dialect continuum spoken by West Germanic peoples along the coast of Frisia on the North Sea during the 5th century. Old English and other Anglic languages developed on the British Isles following the migration of speakers there, while the Frisian languages and Old Low German developed in parallel on the continent. Traditionally, English and Frisian were considered more closely related to one another than they were to other West Germanic languages, but most modern scholarship dismisses this characterisation of the relationship. Though each exhibited similar sound changes not reflected in other closely related languages around the North Sea at the time, they did not undergo specific changes at the same time as one another – indicating the relationship between Old English and Old Frisian was uncharacteristic of languages that share a unique phylogenetic ancestor. Instead, it is likely that the three Ingvaeonic languages – English, Frisian, and Low German – share one common ancestor which acted as a dialect continuum along the North Sea coast, later splitting off into the three languages during the Migration Period, around the 5th century. Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern English. Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other Anglic languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Yola dialects of Ireland.

Like Icelandic and Faroese, the development of English in the British Isles isolated it from the continental Germanic languages and their influences, and it has since diverged considerably. English is not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic language, as it differs in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology. However, some of these, such as Dutch and Frisian, do show strong affinities with English, especially with its earlier stages.

English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish. These shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor called Proto-Germanic. Some shared features of Germanic languages include the division of verbs into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs, and the sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants, known as Grimm's and Verner's laws. English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic.