It’s an official language in several African countries as well, such as Liberia, Nigeria, and South Africa, but is spoken worldwide in more than 100. It’s learned around the world by children in school as a foreign language and often becomes a common denominator between people of different nationalities when they meet while traveling, doing business, or in other contexts.
According to Christine Kenneally in her book “The First Word,” “Today there are about 6,000 languages in the world, and half of the world’s population speaks only 10 of them. English is the single most dominant of these 10. British colonialism initiated the spread of English across the globe; it has been spoken nearly everywhere and has become even more prevalent since World War II, with the global reach of American power.” and now, a third of the world’s population speaks English as a first or secondary language, over 2 billion people.
English derived from a Proto-Indo-European language spoken by nomads wandering Europe about 5,000 years ago. German also came from this language. English is conventionally divided into three major historical periods: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. Old English was brought to the British Isles by Germanic peoples: the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, starting in 449. With the establishment of centers of learning in Winchester, histories being written, and the translation of important Latin texts into West Saxon’s dialect in the 800s, the dialect is spoken there became the official “Old English.” Adopted words came from Scandinavian languages. English is ever adopting new words from other languages (350 languages, according to David Crystal in “English as a Global Language”). About three-quarters of its words come from Greek and Latin, but, as Ammon Shea points out in “Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation,” “it is certainly not a Romance language, it is a Germanic one. Evidence of this may be found in the fact that it is quite easy to create a sentence without words of Latin origin, but pretty much impossible to make one that has no words from Old English.”
With so many sources behind its evolution, English is malleable, with words also being invented regularly as well. Robert Burchfield, in “The English Language,” calls the language “a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless. No form of linguistic engineering and no amount of linguistic legislation will prevent the myriads of change that lie ahead.”Nowadays, there are three different international exams in the English language, and they called: IELTS, TOEFL, and GRE. In order to the importance of these exams, I have assigned three separate sections to them. So you can know almost everything about them on their specific pages on this website.
Besides, this information about the International structural English language, I have already prepared for you some extra information about this useful language, and you can download them on this page as well as in the part of the entertainment.
I hope you enjoy and like them. Good Luck…
- IRAN introducing in a nutshell:
- Introduce some Jobs and Occupations:
- Lyrics of the song ‘Send my Love’ by Adele:
- How we can write good sentences:
