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127-405: Belizean Creole is a contact language that developed and grew between 1650 and 1930, as a result of the slave trade . Belizean Creole, like many Creole languages, first started as a pidgin . It was a way for people of other backgrounds and languages, in this case slaves and English colonisers within the logging industry, to communicate with each other. Over generations the language developed into

254-551: A creole , being a language used as some people’s mother tongue language. Belizean Creoles are people of Afro-European origin. While it is difficult to estimate the exact number of Belizean Creole speakers, it is estimated that there are more than 70,000 in Belize who speak the language. The 2010 Belize Census recorded that 25.9% of the people within Belize claimed Creole ethnicity and 44.6% claimed to speak Belizean Creole and put

381-553: A mixed language or a creole —a theory called the Middle English creole hypothesis . Although the great influence of these languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed language. English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with other Germanic languages including Dutch , German , and Swedish . These shared innovations show that

508-467: A pidgin languages when there exists a need for some type of verbal communication between members of communities who do not share the same language. In the case of Belize Kriol, the pidgin would have developed as a result of West Africans being captured and taken to the Americas as slaves to work in the logging industries, where they would be forced to communicate with slave owners of European descent. For

635-644: A 2012 official Eurobarometer poll (conducted when the UK was still a member of the EU), 38 percent of the EU respondents outside the countries where English is an official language said they could speak English well enough to have a conversation in that language. The next most commonly mentioned foreign language, French (which is the most widely known foreign language in the UK and Ireland), could be used in conversation by 12 percent of respondents. A working knowledge of English has become

762-527: A common language interact closely. Resulting from this contact a pidgin may develop, which may eventually become a full-fledged creole language through the process of creolization (though some linguists assert that a creole need not emerge from a pidgin). Prime examples of this are Aukan and Saramaccan , spoken in Suriname , which have vocabulary mainly from Portuguese, English and Dutch. A much rarer but still observed process, according to some linguists,

889-658: A distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms , and word order was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns ( he , him , his ) and has a few verb inflections ( speak , speaks , speaking , spoke , spoken ), but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings. Its closest relative

1016-514: A few other books that were solely based on Kriol grammar. There has also been a rise in poetry, fiction, and newspapers written in Kriol. Kriol shares phonological similarities with many Caribbean English Creoles as well as with English, its superstrate language . Pidgin languages have a general tendency to simplify the phonology of a language in order to ensure successful communication. Many creoles keep this tendency after creolization . Kriol

1143-490: A foreign language, make up the "expanding circle". The distinctions between English as a first language, as a second language, and as a foreign language are often debatable and may change in particular countries over time. For example, in the Netherlands and some other countries of Europe, knowledge of English as a second language is nearly universal, with over 80 percent of the population able to use it, and thus English

1270-436: A habitual aspect in its own right. Other creoles have a general tendency to merge the habitual with the completive, the habitual with the progressive, or the habitual with the future. Kriol however, does not clearly merge it with anything. Thus, we can only assume that the habitual is expressed by context and not by morphological marking. The completive aspect is expressed either without marking — that is, by context only — or by

1397-520: A more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English as they grow up through day-to-day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by non-native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in

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1524-424: A new contact language may be created as a result of the influence, such as a pidgin , creole , or mixed language . In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs with smaller-scale lasting effects on the language; these may include the borrowing of loanwords , calques , or other types of linguistic material. Multilingualism has been common throughout much of human history , and today most people in

1651-510: A number of functions, including: The pronominal system of Standard English can distinguish person, number, gender and case. Some varieties of Kriol do not have a gender or case distinction, though most do; but Kriol does distinguish between the second person singular and plural (you). The question words found in Kriol are: Contact language Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact

1778-695: A number of other Anglic languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian dialect and Yola language of Ireland. Like Icelandic and Faroese , the development of English in the British Isles isolated it from the continental Germanic languages and 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 or Frisian, do show strong affinities with English, especially with its earlier stages. Unlike Icelandic and Faroese, which were isolated,

1905-586: A particular geographic region. For example, in Switzerland , the local French has been influenced by German and vice versa. In Scotland , Scots has been heavily influenced by English, and many Scots terms have been adopted into the regional English dialect. The result of the contact of two languages can be the replacement of one by the other. This is most common when one language has a higher social position ( prestige ). This sometimes leads to language endangerment or extinction . When language shift occurs,

2032-684: A requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine and computing. English has become so important in scientific publishing that more than 80 percent of all scientific journal articles indexed by Chemical Abstracts in 1998 were written in English, as were 90 percent of all articles in natural science publications by 1996 and 82 percent of articles in humanities publications by 1995. International communities such as international business people may use English as an auxiliary language , with an emphasis on vocabulary suitable for their domain of interest. This has led some scholars to develop

2159-407: A rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection and a fairly fixed subject–verb–object word order . Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses , aspects and moods , as well as passive constructions , interrogatives , and some negation . The earliest form of English

2286-556: A sign language and an oral language, even if lexical borrowing and code switching also occur, the interface between the oral and signed modes produces unique phenomena: fingerspelling , fingerspelling/sign combination, initialisation, CODA talk, TDD conversation, mouthing and contact signing . English language English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family , whose speakers, called Anglophones , originated in early medieval England on

2413-758: A significant minority speaks English. The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the United States (at least 231 million), the United Kingdom (60 million), Canada (19 million), Australia (at least 17 million), South Africa (4.8 million), Ireland (4.2 million), and New Zealand (3.7 million). In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents, and local people who speak other languages and new immigrants learn English to communicate in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. The inner-circle countries provide

2540-419: A society is called linguistic ecology . Language contact can take place between two or more sign languages, and the expected contact phenomena occur: lexical borrowing, foreign "accent", interference, code switching, pidgins, creoles, and mixed systems. Language contact is extremely common in most deaf communities , which are almost always located within a dominant oral language culture. However, between

2667-422: A substrate language which was then formed into a creole by their children. English is still considered the main official language of Belize, as it carries much prestige , due to the fact it is a majority language . Road signs, official documents, and such are all written in English and the people of Belize are taught in English throughout their educational careers. Despite this, bilingualism and multilingualism

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2794-426: A systematic grammatical structure to the language. It is at this point that the language becomes a fully fledged language, as it becomes a mother tongue for generations of speakers, and the result is a creole language. Belize Kriol specifically developed as a result of many West African slaves being subjected to English-speaking owners; and as a result, these people were forced to create a pidgin language using English as

2921-574: A trait that is typical of the Indo-European family but rare in Sino-Tibetan. Newar has also absorbed grammatical features like verb tenses . Also, Romanian was influenced by the Slavic languages that were spoken by neighbouring tribes in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire not only in vocabulary but also phonology . English has a few phrases, adapted from French, in which

3048-447: A verb ending ( present plural): From the 8th to the 11th centuries, Old English gradually transformed through language contact with Old Norse in some regions. The waves of Norse (Viking) colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English into intense contact with Old Norse , a North Germanic language. Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in

3175-399: A vernacular closer to traditional Kriol, because of this, has gained more prestige than other vernaculars that stray farther away from the traditional vernacular. English taught in the schools of Belize is based on British English , but it is often influenced by the teachers' Kriol speech. The 1999 Ministry of Education: School Effectiveness Report (p. 84) notes that "Creole is spoken as

3302-563: Is Old Frisian , but even some centuries after the Anglo-Saxon migration, Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility with other Germanic varieties. Even in the 9th and 10th centuries, amidst the Danelaw and other Viking invasions, there is historical evidence that Old Norse and Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility, although probably the northern dialects of Old English were more similar to Old Norse than

3429-419: Is "a language that teases but just escapes the comprehension of a native speaker of English." There are multiple regional vernacular varieties of Belizean Kriol; so, depending on where one is, the vernacular may be slightly different. A locale in the south of Belize, such as Punta Gorda , may have a slightly different Kriol vernacular than that one of the more northern areas, such as Belize City , which shows

3556-417: Is a prepositional phrase. No overt marking is used when the complement is an adjective. di , finally, is used in the progressive aspect. The verb "to go" is irregular in Kriol, especially when set in the future progressive. It does not use the progressive marker di , which is replaced by the morpheme and ɡwein . The past tense is expressed similarly: instead of employing mi , the lexical item ɡaan

3683-518: Is absent as a grammatical category). Mufwene (1984) and Gibson and Levy (1984) propose a past-only habitual category marked by /juustu doz/ , as in /weh wi juustu doz liv ih noh az koal az ya/ ("where we used to live is not as cold as here"). For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb expresses the habitual, as in /tam aalweiz noa entaim keiti tel pɑn hii/ ("Tom always knows when Katy tells/has told about him"). Like many other Caribbean Creoles, /fi/ and /fu/ have

3810-400: 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 59 sovereign states (such as India , Ireland , and Canada ). In some other countries, it is the sole or dominant language for historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law (such as in

3937-466: Is also undergoing change under the influence of American English, fuelled by the strong presence of American English in the media and the prestige associated with the United States as a world power. As of 2016 , 400 million people spoke English as their first language , and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is the largest language by number of speakers . English

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4064-610: Is also widely used in media and literature, and the number of English language books published annually in India is the third largest in the world after the US and UK. However, English is rarely spoken as a first language, numbering only around a couple hundred-thousand people, and less than 5% of the population speak fluent English in India. David Crystal claimed in 2004 that, combining native and non-native speakers, India now has more people who speak or understand English than any other country in

4191-407: Is an official language of countries populated by few descendants of native speakers of English. It has also become by far the most important language of international communication when people who share no native language meet anywhere in the world. The Indian linguist Braj Kachru distinguished countries where English is spoken with a three circles model . In his model, Kachru based his model on

4318-538: Is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon ( c.  450–1150 ). Old English developed from a set of West Germanic dialects, often grouped as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic , and originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia , Lower Saxony and southern Jutland by Germanic peoples known to the historical record as the Angles , Saxons , and Jutes . From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as

4445-442: Is called contact linguistics . Language contact can occur at language borders , between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration , with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum . When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Intensive language contact may result in language convergence or relexification . In some cases

4572-413: Is common within Belize; and many people of all ethnic backgrounds in Belize have adopted the minority language Kriol as their native language . Kriol is the lingua franca of Belize and is the first language of some Garifunas , Mestizos , Maya , and other ethnic groups. It is a second language for most others in the country. Today, Belize Kriol is the first or second language of the majority of

4699-610: Is derived mainly from English but is influenced by other languages brought into the country due to the slave trade. Its substrate languages are the Native American language Miskito , Spanish , and the various West African and Bantu languages that were brought into the country by slaves, which include Akan , Efik , Ewe , Fula , Ga , Hausa , Igbo , Kikongo , and Wolof . There are numerous theories as to how creole languages form . The most common and linguistically supported hypothesis indicates that creoles start out as

4826-478: Is made about the contemporary borrowing of English words into other languages, but this phenomenon is not new, and it is not very large by historical standards. The large-scale importation of words from Latin , French and other languages into English in the 16th and the 17th centuries was more significant. Some languages have borrowed so much that they have become scarcely recognisable. Armenian borrowed so many words from Iranian languages , for example, that it

4953-421: Is made by adding -a to the stem ("taal" – "taala" – tall). The morpheme den is employed to form comparative statements: for instance, "hî tɑlɑ dan shee" – He is taller than she. Superlatives are created by adding -es to the stem. In all cases, the use of the definite article di is obligatory. The copula is present if the superlative is used predicatively. An example could be: "She dah di taales" – She

5080-403: Is more specific than dɑ is inɑ ("into"). It is used in contexts where dɑ is not strong enough. Together with the verb "look", however, dɑ is not used and considered as incorrect. To express "to look at", it is wrong to say "luk da". The correct version would be "luk pan". In a noun phrase, Kriol can employ a structure of both noun and pronoun to create emphasis. The ordering then

5207-477: Is no exception to this. Kriol uses a high number of nasalized vowels, palatalizes non-labial stops, and prenasalizes voiced stops. Consonant clusters are reduced at the end of words and many syllables are reduced to only a consonant and vowel . Some of these sounds only appear as allophones of phonemes. Kriol uses three voiced plosives ( /b/ /d/ /ɡ/ ) and three voiceless plosives ( /p/ /t/ /k/ ). The voiceless stops can also be aspirated . However, aspiration

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5334-746: Is not a constant feature; therefore, the aspirated and non-aspirated forms are allophonic . The language employs three nasal consonants, ( /m/ /n/ /ŋ/ ). It makes extensive use of fricatives, both unvoiced ( /f/ /s/ /ʂ/ ) and voiced ( /v/ /z/ /ʐ/ . Its two liquids, /l/ and /r/ , are articulated alveo-palatally. The tongue is more lax here than in American English; its position is more similar to that of British English. Kriol's glides /w/ , /j/ , and /h/ are used extensively. Glottal stops occur rarely and inconsistently. Kriol makes use of eleven vowels: nine monophthongs , three diphthongs , and schwa [ə] . The most frequently occurring diphthong, /ai/ ,

5461-422: Is noun + pronoun + verb (for instance, "mista filip hi noa di ansa" – Mr. Philip knows the answer). Adjectives are employed predicatively and attributively. They can be intensified either by the postposed adverb modifier bad , by iteration, or by the use of the adverb modifier onli . Iteration is here the usual way. Comparatives and superlatives are constructed according to morphosyntactic rules. A comparative

5588-536: Is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, but it developed further in the period from 1150 to 1500. With the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the now-Norsified Old English language was subject to another wave of intense contact, this time with Old French , in particular Old Norman French , influencing it as a superstrate. The Norman French spoken by

5715-424: Is routinely used to communicate with foreigners and often in higher education. In these countries, although English is not used for government business, its widespread use puts them at the boundary between the "outer circle" and "expanding circle". English is unusual among world languages in how many of its users are not native speakers but speakers of English as a second or foreign language. Many users of English in

5842-517: Is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans. The countries where English is spoken can be grouped into different categories according to how English is used in each country. The "inner circle" countries with many native speakers of English share an international standard of written English and jointly influence speech norms for English around the world. English does not belong to just one country, and it does not belong solely to descendants of English settlers. English

5969-498: Is that Kriol allows double negation, so that some conjunctions are used differently. Some examples of conjunctions in Kriol are: "an" (and), "but" (but), "if" (if), "o:" (or) etc. Questions usually take the same form in Kriol as they do in Standard English: question word + subject + verb. The " do-support " does not occur here either. The rising intonation at the end of the sentence may increase even more if no question word

6096-458: Is the formation of mixed languages . Whereas creoles are formed by communities lacking a common language, mixed languages are formed by communities fluent in both languages. They tend to inherit much more of the complexity (grammatical, phonological, etc.) of their parent languages, whereas creoles begin as simple languages and then develop in complexity more independently. It is sometimes explained as bilingual communities that no longer identify with

6223-424: Is the possibility to mark the past by putting the tense marker | mi | before the verb. Overt marking is rare, however, if the sentence includes a semantic temporal marker, such as "yestudeh" (yesterday) or "laas season" (last season). The future tense is indicated by employing the preverbal marker wa or a . Unlike the marking of past tense, this marking is not optional. The preverbal marker di expresses

6350-476: Is the tallest. Adverbs are used much as they are in Standard English. In almost all cases, they differ from adjectives not in form but in function. There are, however, a few exceptions, such as "properli" (properly), "errli" (early) or "po:li" (poorly). Adverbs can be intensified by reduplication. Most Kriol conjunctions are very similar to English and are employed in the same way. The main difference

6477-777: Is the third person pronoun group beginning with th- ( they, them, their ) which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with h- ( hie, him, hera ). Other core Norse loanwords include "give", "get", "sky", "skirt", "egg", and "cake", typically displacing a native Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Old Norse in this era retained considerable mutual intelligibility with some dialects of Old English, particularly northern ones. Englischmen þeyz hy hadde fram þe bygynnyng þre manner speche, Souþeron, Northeron, and Myddel speche in þe myddel of þe lond, ... Noþeles by comyxstion and mellyng, furst wiþ Danes, and afterward wiþ Normans, in menye þe contray longage ys asperyed, and som vseþ strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbytting. Although, from

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6604-447: Is used in all regional varieties. Both /au/ and /oi/ can occur, but they are new additions and are viewed as a sign of decreolization. The same is perceived of four of the less productive monophthongs. Unlike most creoles, Kriol has a standardized orthography . Consonants: b, ch, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, sh, t, v, w, y, z, zh The symbol choices for lengthened vowels come from ways those vowels are spelled in English, not

6731-464: Is used. A verb that is used extensively in each conversation is mek . It can be used as a modal in casual requests, in threats and intentional statements, and, of course, like the standard verb "to make". Plurals are usually formed in Kriol by inserting the obligatory postnomial marker de . Variations of this marker are den and dem . As decreolization progresses, the standard English plural ending -s occurs far more frequently. Sometimes,

6858-452: Is used. Thus, most declarative sentences can become interrogative with the right intonation. "Which" has various translations in Kriol. If the speaker means "which", he uses witʂ , but he can also use witʂ wan for "which one". The tense/aspect system of Kriol is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphologically marked past tense forms corresponding to English -ed -t. There are three preverbal particles: "mi" and "did" for

6985-403: The de is added to this form: for instance, in "shoes de" – shoes. The absence of an appropriate plural marker occurs rarely. Many Spanish, Maya, and Garifuna words refer to popular produce and food items: The construction of sentences in Kriol is very similar to that in English. It uses a Subject-Verb-Object order (SVO). All declarative and most interrogative sentences follow this pattern,

7112-485: The Augustinian canon Orrm , which highlights the blending of both Old English and Anglo-Norman elements in English for the first time. In Wycliff'e Bible of the 1380s, the verse Matthew 8:20 was written: Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heuene han nestis . Here the plural suffix -n on the verb have is still retained, but none of the case endings on the nouns are present. By the 12th century Middle English

7239-546: The Danelaw area around York, which was the centre of Norse colonisation; today these features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English . The centre of Norsified English was in the Midlands around Lindsey . After 920 CE, when Lindsey was incorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity, English spread extensively throughout the region. An element of Norse influence that continues in all English varieties today

7366-552: The European Free Trade Association , Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) set English as their organisation's sole working language even though most members are not countries with a majority of native English speakers. While the European Union (EU) allows member states to designate any of the national languages as an official language of

7493-536: The Germanic language branch, and as of 2021 , Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.5 billion speakers worldwide. 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

7620-504: The International Phonetic Alphabet . There is a dictionary for Kriol with over 5000 entries, including sample sentences for each word. The present tense verb is not marked overtly in Kriol. It also does not indicate number or person . As an unmarked verb, it can refer both to present and to perfective . The English past tense marker | d | at the end of the verbs indicates acrolectal speech. However, there

7747-767: The Low Saxon and Frisian languages . English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages . Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, whose languages gradually evolved into the Anglic languages in the British Isles , and into the Frisian languages and Low German /Low Saxon on

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7874-668: The United Nations at the end of World War II , English had become pre-eminent and is now the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Many other worldwide international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee , specify English as a working language or official language of the organisation. Many regional international organisations such as

8001-518: The palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic (see Phonological history of Old English § Palatalization ). The earliest varieties of an English language, collectively known as Old English or "Anglo-Saxon", evolved from a group of North Sea Germanic dialects brought to Britain in the 5th century. Old English dialects were later influenced by Old Norse -speaking Viking invaders and settlers , starting in

8128-564: The "outer circle" countries are countries such as the Philippines , Jamaica , India , Pakistan , Singapore , Malaysia and Nigeria with a much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English as a second language for education, government, or domestic business, and its routine use for school instruction and official interactions with the government. Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to

8255-859: The 1990s, the internet, along with previous influences such as radio and television, telephone communication and printed materials, has expanded and changed the many ways in which languages can be influenced by each other and by technology. Change as a result of contact is often one-sided. Chinese, for instance, has had a profound effect on the development of Japanese , but Chinese remains relatively free of Japanese influence other than some modern terms that were reborrowed after they were coined in Japan and based on Chinese forms and using Chinese characters. In India , Hindi and other native languages have been influenced by English, and loanwords from English are part of everyday vocabulary. In some cases, language contact may lead to mutual exchange, but that may be confined to

8382-617: The 8th and 9th centuries. Middle English began in the late 11th century after the Norman Conquest of England, when a considerable amount of Old French vocabulary was incorporated into English over some three centuries. Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the start of the Great Vowel Shift and the Renaissance trend of borrowing further Latin and Greek words and roots, concurrent with

8509-608: The Angles. English may have a small amount of substrate influence from Common Brittonic, and a number of possible Brittonicisms in English have been proposed, but whether most of these supposed Brittonicisms are actually a direct result of Brittonic substrate influence is disputed. Old English was divided into four dialects: the Anglian dialects ( Mercian and Northumbrian ) and the Saxon dialects ( Kentish and West Saxon ). Through

8636-524: The British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, former colonies often did not reject English but rather continued to use it as independent countries setting their own language policies. For example, the view of the English language among many Indians has gone from associating it with colonialism to associating it with economic progress, and English continues to be an official language of India. English

8763-701: The British were supposed to cease all logging operations along the Caribbean coast of Central America, except in the Belize settlement. Many of the settlers from the Miskito Coast moved to Belize, bringing their Miskito Coast Creole with them. The immigrants outnumbered the Baymen five to one. The local Kriol speech shifted to become something more like the Miskito Coast Creole . Belize Kriol

8890-547: The Early Modern period includes the works of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I . Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the consonant clusters /kn ɡn sw/ in knight , gnat , and sword were still pronounced. Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic represent

9017-600: The English Language , which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms. In 1828, Noah Webster published the American Dictionary of the English language to try to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of

9144-557: The English-speaking inner circle countries outside Britain helped level dialect distinctions and produce koineised forms of English in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The majority of immigrants to the United States without British ancestry rapidly adopted English after arrival. Now the majority of the United States population are monolingual English speakers. English has ceased to be an "English language" in

9271-483: The National Kriol Council of Belize are at the forefront of this movement, striving to bring more prestige and recognition to the language. Current literary works using Kriol include an English and Kriol dictionary, and a translation of the Bible's New Testament . The dictionary brought attention to grammar, as well as the definition of common Kriol words, and the dictionary influenced the creation of

9398-554: The Roman economy and administration collapsed . By the 7th century, this Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in Britain , replacing the languages of Roman Britain (43–409): Common Brittonic , a Celtic language , and British Latin , brought to Britain by the Roman occupation. At this time, these dialects generally resisted influence from the then-local Brittonic and Latin languages. England and English (originally Ænglaland and Ænglisc ) are both named after

9525-494: The Union, in practice English is the main working language of EU organisations. Although in most countries English is not an official language, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language . In the countries of the EU, English is the most widely spoken foreign language in nineteen of the twenty-five member states where it is not an official language (that is, the countries other than Ireland and Malta ). In

9652-519: The United States and United Kingdom ). 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% of total speakers of

9779-460: The adjective follows the noun: court-martial, attorney-general, Lake Superior. A language's influence widens as its speakers grow in power. Chinese, Greek , Latin, Portuguese , French, Spanish , Arabic , Persian , Sanskrit , Russian , German and English have each seen periods of widespread importance and have had varying degrees of influence on the native languages spoken in the areas over which they have held sway. Especially during and since

9906-407: The base from which English spreads to other countries in the world. Estimates of the numbers of second language and foreign-language English speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1 billion, depending on how proficiency is defined. Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. In Kachru's three-circles model,

10033-453: The basis for the required controlled natural languages Seaspeak and Airspeak, used as international languages of seafaring and aviation. English used to have parity with French and German in scientific research, but now it dominates that field. It achieved parity with French as a language of diplomacy at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919. By the time of the foundation of

10160-400: The beginning, Englishmen had three manners of speaking, southern, northern and midlands speech in the middle of the country, ... Nevertheless, through intermingling and mixing, first with Danes and then with Normans, amongst many the country language has arisen, and some use strange stammering, chattering, snarling, and grating gnashing. John Trevisa , c.  1385 Middle English

10287-638: The consensus of educated English speakers around the world, without any oversight by any government or international organisation. American listeners readily understand most British broadcasting, and British listeners readily understand most American broadcasting. Most English speakers around the world can understand radio programmes, television programmes, and films from many parts of the English-speaking world. Both standard and non-standard varieties of English can include both formal or informal styles, distinguished by word choice and syntax and use both technical and non-technical registers. The settlement history of

10414-701: The continent. The Frisian languages, which together with the Anglic languages form the Anglo-Frisian languages , are the closest living relatives of English. Low German/Low Saxon is also closely related, and sometimes English, the Frisian languages, and Low German are grouped together as the North Sea Germanic languages, though this grouping remains debated. Old English evolved into Middle English , which in turn evolved into Modern English. Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into

10541-522: The country's inhabitants. Many of them speak standard English as well, and a rapid process of decreolization is taking place. As a result, a creole continuum exists and speakers are able to code-switch among various mesolect registers, between the most basilect to the acrolect ( Mid-Atlantic ) varieties. The acrolect, much like the basilect, is rarely heard. A 1987 travel guide in the Chicago Tribune newspaper reported that Belize Kriol

10668-457: The cultures of either of the languages they speak, and seek to develop their own language as an expression of their own cultural uniqueness. Some forms of language contact affect only a particular segment of a speech community. Consequently, change may be manifested only in particular dialects , jargons , or registers . South African English , for example, has been significantly affected by Afrikaans in terms of lexis and pronunciation , but

10795-476: The development of English was influenced by a long series of invasions of the British Isles by other peoples and languages, particularly Old Norse and French dialects . These left a profound mark of their own on the language, so that English shows some similarities in vocabulary and grammar with many languages outside its linguistic clades —but it is not mutually intelligible with any of those languages either. Some scholars have argued that English can be considered

10922-476: The distinct characteristics of Early Modern English. In the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, written in Early Modern English, Matthew 8:20 says, "The Foxes haue holes and the birds of the ayre haue nests." This exemplifies the loss of case and its effects on sentence structure (replacement with subject–verb–object word order, and the use of of instead of the non-possessive genitive), and

11049-401: The early period of Old English were written using a runic script . By the 6th century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms . It included the runic letters wynn ⟨ ƿ ⟩ and thorn ⟨ þ ⟩ , and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ ð ⟩ , and ash ⟨ æ ⟩ . Old English is essentially

11176-551: The educational reforms of King Alfred in the 9th century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex , the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety . The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Cædmon's Hymn , is written in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from

11303-695: The elite in England eventually developed into the Anglo-Norman language . Because Norman was spoken primarily by the elites and nobles, while the lower classes continued speaking English, the main influence of Norman was the introduction of a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains. Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar. The distinction between nominative and accusative cases

11430-408: The expanding circle use it to communicate with other people from the expanding circle, so that interaction with native speakers of English plays no part in their decision to use the language. Non-native varieties of English are widely used for international communication, and speakers of one such variety often encounter features of other varieties. Very often today a conversation in English anywhere in

11557-440: The first generation of people speaking the pidgin language, the pidgin is not fully developed and the grammar of the language is not as systematic as fully fledged languages. When the people speaking the pidgin language begin having children who grow up having no entirely developed language, they will take the partial grammar of the pidgin language their parents speak and use it as a sort of blueprint with which they are able to assign

11684-457: The first language in most homes." Belizean people speak English, Kriol, and often Spanish, while learning the English system of writing and reading in schools. It is a slightly different system of communication from the standard forms. In recent years there has been a movement to have Kriol used more within the Belizean education system and in government documentation. The Belize Kriol Project and

11811-721: The growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC and other broadcasters, caused the language to spread across the planet much faster. In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been. As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published, and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his A Dictionary of

11938-479: The history of English was Early Modern English (1500–1700). Early Modern English was characterised by the Great Vowel Shift (1350–1700), inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation. The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English. It was a chain shift , meaning that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. Mid and open vowels were raised , and close vowels were broken into diphthongs . For example,

12065-407: The history of how English spread in different countries, how users acquire English, and the range of uses English has in each country. The three circles change membership over time. Countries with large communities of native speakers of English (the inner circle) include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where

12192-403: The inner-circle countries, and they may show grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries. In the three-circles model, countries such as Poland, China, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries where English is taught as

12319-423: The interrogatives with a changed emphasis. The construction of the phrases follows Standard English in many ways. Locatives are more frequently used in Kriol and much more productive than in Standard English. The general locative is expressed by the morpheme da ("at" or "to"). It is possible to use to or pɑn ("on") instead. This is an indication of either emphasis or decreolization. Another morpheme which

12446-531: The introduction of loanwords from French ( ayre ) and word replacements ( bird originally meaning "nestling" had replaced OE fugol ). By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. English

12573-475: The introduction of the printing press to London. This era notably culminated in the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare . The printing press greatly standardised English spelling, which has remained largely unchanged since then, despite a wide variety of later sound shifts in English dialects. Modern English has spread around the world since the 17th century as a consequence of

12700-489: The island of Great Britain . The namesake of the language is the Angles , one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain . It is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations ) and the United States . English is the third-most spoken native language , after Standard Chinese and Spanish ; it

12827-483: The language that is replaced (known as the substratum ) can leave a profound impression on the replacing language (known as the superstratum ) when people retain features of the substratum as they learn the new language and pass these features on to their children, which leads to the development of a new variety. For example, the Latin that came to replace local languages in present-day France during Ancient Rome times

12954-431: 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

13081-464: The meaning, together with context. Emphasis can be strengthened by adding emphatic markers, or through repetition and redundancy. There are four forms of "be" in Kriol: de , two uses of di , and the absence of a marker. The equative form di is used as a copula (when the complement of the verb is either a noun or a noun phrase). de is the locative form that is used when the verb's complement

13208-446: The number of speakers at over 130,000. It is estimated that there are as many as 85,000 Creoles that have migrated to the United States and may or may not still speak the language. Belizean Creole is the first language of some Garifunas , Mestizos , Maya , and other ethnic groups. When the National Kriol Council began standardising the orthography of the language, it decided to promote the spelling Kriol , though they continue to use

13335-558: The other dialects of English have remained almost totally unaffected by Afrikaans other than a few loanwords. In some cases, a language develops an acrolect that contains elements of a more prestigious language. For example, in England during a large part of the Middle Ages , upper-class speech was dramatically influenced by French to the point that it often resembled a French dialect. The broader study of contact varieties within

13462-457: The past, "di" as an "aspect marker", and a host of articles to indicate the future ("(w)a(n)", "gwein", "gouɲ"). These are not verbs, they are simply invariant particles that cannot stand alone, unlike the English "to be". Their function differs somewhat from English. The progressive is marked by /di~de/ . Past habitual is marked by /doz/ or /juustu/ . The present habitual aspect is unmarked but can be indicated by "always", "usually", etc. (i.e.

13589-426: The prestige varieties among the middle classes. In modern English, the loss of grammatical case is almost complete (it is now only found in pronouns, such as he and him , she and her , who and whom ), and SVO word order is mostly fixed. Some changes, such as the use of do-support , have become universalised. (Earlier English did not use the word "do" as a general auxiliary as Modern English does; at first it

13716-506: The progressive aspect in both past and present tense. However, if the past is not marked overtly (lexically or by using mi ), an unambiguous understanding is only possible in context. di is always mandatory. In the past progressive, it is possible to achieve an unambiguous meaning by combining mi + di + verb. Progressive action in the future can be expressed by using bi in conjunction with wɑ . The correct combination here would be wɑ + bi + verb. Kriol does not have

13843-678: The reign of Henry V . Around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents , and a new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard , developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands . In 1476, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England and began publishing the first printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English. Literature from

13970-468: The sense of belonging only to people who are ethnically English . Use of English is growing country-by-country internally and for international communication. Most people learn English for practical rather than ideological reasons. Many speakers of English in Africa have become part of an "Afro-Saxon" language community that unites Africans from different countries. As decolonisation proceeded throughout

14097-483: The source of approximately 28% of Modern English words , and from Latin , which is the source of an additional 28% . As such, though most of its total vocabulary comes from Romance languages , Modern English's grammar, phonology, and most commonly used words in everyday use keep it genealogically classified under the Germanic branch. It exists on a dialect continuum with Scots and is then most closely related to

14224-474: The southern dialects. Theoretically, as late as the 900s AD, a commoner from certain (northern) parts of England could hold a conversation with a commoner from certain parts of Scandinavia. Research continues into the details of the myriad tribes in peoples in England and Scandinavia and the mutual contacts between them. The translation of Matthew 8:20 from 1000 shows examples of case endings ( nominative plural, accusative plural, genitive singular) and

14351-488: The spelling Creole to refer to the people themselves. Belizean Creole was developed as a lingua franca for those who were forced to work within the logging industry, and the language itself is linked to many West African substrate languages . This is due to the fact that these slaves, more specifically identified as Belizean "Creoles", were taken from Africa and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and brought to what

14478-455: The study of English as an auxiliary language. The trademarked Globish uses a relatively small subset of English vocabulary (about 1500 words, designed to represent the highest use in international business English) in combination with the standard English grammar. Other examples include Simple English . The increased use of the English language globally has had an effect on other languages, leading to some English words being assimilated into

14605-402: The use of a completive preverbal marker, such as don or finiʂ . The conditional mood is expressed through the conditional verbs wuda , mi-wa , and mia . The short version, da , is employed only in the present tense; the past tense requires the longer forms. There is no overt lexical marking of active and passive in Kriol. It is only the emphasis of a sentence that can clarify

14732-473: The word bite was originally pronounced as the word beet is today, and the second vowel in the word about was pronounced as the word boot is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages. English began to rise in prestige, relative to Norman French, during

14859-401: The world are multilingual. Multilingual speakers may engage in code-switching , the use of multiple languages in a single conversation. Methods from sociolinguistics (the study of language use in society), from corpus linguistics and from formal linguistics are used in the study of language contact. The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words. Much

14986-785: The world may include no native speakers of English at all, even while including speakers from several different countries. This is particularly true of the shared vocabulary of mathematics and the sciences. English is a pluricentric language , which means that no one national authority sets the standard for use of the language. Spoken English, including English used in broadcasting, generally follows national pronunciation standards that are established by custom rather than by regulation. International broadcasters are usually identifiable as coming from one country rather than another through their accents , but newsreader scripts are also composed largely in international standard written English . The norms of standard written English are maintained purely by

15113-539: The world, but the number of English speakers in India is uncertain, with most scholars concluding that the United States still has more speakers of English than India. Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca , is also regarded as the first world language . English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. English is, by international treaty,

15240-438: The worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States. Through all types of printed and electronic media in these countries, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and professional contexts such as science, navigation , and law. Its modern grammar is the result of a gradual change from a dependent-marking pattern typical of Indo-European with

15367-405: Was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Oceania, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly independent states that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. In the 20th century

15494-655: Was at first considered a divergent branch of the Indo-Iranian languages and was not recognised as an independent branch of the Indo-European languages for many decades. The influence can go deeper, extending to the exchange of even basic characteristics of a language such as morphology and grammar . Newar , for example, spoken in Nepal , is a Sino-Tibetan language distantly related to Chinese but has had so many centuries of contact with neighbouring Indo-Iranian languages that it has even developed noun inflection ,

15621-518: Was fully developed, integrating both Norse and French features; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early Modern English around 1500. Middle English literature includes Geoffrey Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales , and Thomas Malory 's Le Morte d'Arthur . In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer. The next period in

15748-521: Was influenced by Gaulish and Germanic . The distinct pronunciation of the Hiberno-English dialect, spoken in Ireland , comes partially from the influence of the substratum of Irish . Outside the Indo-European family, Coptic , the last stage of ancient Egyptian , is a substratum of Egyptian Arabic . Language contact can also lead to the development of new languages when people without

15875-505: Was lost except in personal pronouns, the instrumental case was dropped, and the use of the genitive case was limited to indicating possession . The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms, and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible. The transition from Old to Middle English can be placed during the writing of the Ormulum . The oldest Middle English texts that were written by

16002-533: Was only used in question constructions, and even then was not obligatory. Now, do-support with the verb have is becoming increasingly standardised.) The use of progressive forms in -ing , appears to be spreading to new constructions, and forms such as had been being built are becoming more common. Regularisation of irregular forms also slowly continues (e.g. dreamed instead of dreamt ), and analytical alternatives to inflectional forms are becoming more common (e.g. more polite instead of politer ). British English

16129-597: Was then known as British Honduras , which was the name of Belize when it was a British crown colony , before gaining independence in September 1981. The European Baymen first began to settle in the area of Belize City in the 1650s. Ken Decker proposed that the creole spoken in Belize previous to 1786 was probably more like Vincentian Creole than the Belize Kriol of today. By the Convention of London of 1786,

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