English language

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The Flag of England, where the English language originates

The English language is a West Germanic language which emerged during the Early Middle Ages in what is today England and southeastern Scotland. It gets its name from the Angles, an early Germanic tribe believed to have inhabited the Angeln peninsula in Southern Schleswig. The language was first used by the Anglo-Saxons, an amalgamation of various Germanic peoples who settled in Great Britain during and after the Roman conquest. The earliest form of English was Old English, which was spoken from the mid-5th century until the 12th century, when England was invaded by the Normans.

Following the invasion, Anglo-Norman and Law French became the prevailing languages of the ruling class, although English persisted among the general population. Middle English, which superseded Old English, was heavily influenced by the conquest, losing its grammatical casing and borrowing a great deal of vocabulary which was Latin, French, and Scandinavian in origin. The Great Vowel Shift along with the standardisation of English gave way to Modern English in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.

Today, due to the historically unrivalled imperialist hegemony of Britain and the United States, English is the global lingua franca. It is the most commonly-learnt second language in the world as well as the third most natively-spoken language after Mandarin and Spanish. English is an official language in over 50 countries as well as many important international organisations such as the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, the International Criminal Court, and Interpol.

Linguistic oddities

English as a language contains many linguistic anomalies, most famously the lack of a phonetic writing system, due to the attempt to classify all the sounds in English using the Latin alphabet, which was notably developed for Latin, and not English. Further anomalies include hold-over spelling from old English and other, older formations, such as in the word "knight". The linguistic standardization through the printing press was especially crude in England, with various regional spelling which reflected local pronunciation being taken as standard spellings, despite the lack of phonetic accuracy. Further oddities were introduced by 17th century grammarians' attempts to create a standard English grammar, for instance the maintaining of the singular and plural "you" but the abandoning of the singular "they" (which is still used and was still used due to the lack of any other third person plural pronoun).

thorn, eth, ash, wynn and missing Z/z in old english

Interestingly, there used to exist four more letters in the English alphabet, namely thorn (Þ/þ), eth (Ð/ð), ash (Æ/æ) and wynn (Ƿ/ƿ). Furthermore in old English there was no Z sound and therefor no symbol to represent it. A "Z" sound would only come about in middle English.

thorn and eth

Thorn and eth both represented the same sound in old English, the "th" sound or /θ/. Both were used interchangeably and often by the same scribes.

ash

In old English the ash character represented a sound in-between "a" and "e", similar to the modern-day pronunciation of cat in some dialects of English. It developed out of the Latin usage of the ash as the stand-in for the diphthong "ae". when representing a long vowel, there is a macron (or less commonly an acute) placed on top of the ash.

wynn

In old English, Wynn represented a "w" sound, similar to today's "w", it developed as a stand-in for the previous writing of "uu" to denote the same sound. It fell out of use in the 1300s with the development of middle English.