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132-483: That is an English language word used for several grammatical purposes. These include use as an adjective , conjunction , pronoun , adverb and intensifier ; it has distance from the speaker, as opposed to words like this . The word did not originally exist in Old English , and its concept was represented by þe . Once it came into being, it was spelt as þæt (among others, such as þet ), taking

264-553: A lexeme is conventionalized as a grammatical marker , it tends to undergo erosion; that is, the phonological substance is likely to be reduced in some way and to become more dependent on surrounding phonetic material". Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva have described different kinds of phonetic erosion for applicable cases: 'Going to' → 'gonna' (or even 'I am going to' → 'I'm gonna' → 'I'mma') and 'because' → 'coz' are examples of erosion in English. Some linguists trace erosion to

396-415: A linguistic expression has changed from a lexical to a grammatical meaning (bleaching), it is likely to lose morphological and syntactic elements that were characteristic of its initial category, but which are not relevant to the grammatical function . This is called decategorialization , or morphological reduction . For example, the demonstrative 'that' as in "that book" came to be used as

528-553: 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

660-452: A relative clause marker, and lost the grammatical category of number ('that' singular vs. 'those' plural), as in "the book that I know" versus "the things that I know". Phonetic erosion (also called phonological attrition or phonological reduction), is another process that is often linked to grammaticalization. It implies that a linguistic expression loses phonetic substance when it has undergone grammaticalization. Heine writes that "once

792-535: A tri-consonantal word root, Indo-European languages without a 100% obligatory match between such a sound unit as syllable and such a meaning unit as morpheme or word, despite an assumed majority of monosyllabic reconstructed word stems/roots in the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis), a difference mostly initiated by the German linguist W. Humboldt , putting Sino-Tibetan languages in a sharp contrast to

924-644: 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

1056-534: A brand-new look to the phonological system of a language, by changing the inventory of phones and phonemes, making new arrangements in the phonotactic patterns of a syllable, etc. Special treatise on the phonological consequences of grammaticalization and lexicalization in the Chinese languages can be found in Wei-Heng Chen (2011), which provides evidence that a morphophonological change can later change into

1188-574: A characteristic of grammaticalization. It can be described as the loss of semantic content. More specifically, with reference to grammaticalization, bleaching refers to the loss of all (or most) lexical content of an entity while only its grammatical content is retained. For example, James Matisoff described bleaching as "the partial effacement of a morpheme's semantic features, the stripping away of some of its precise content so it can be used in an abstracter, grammatical-hardware-like way". John Haiman wrote that "semantic reduction, or bleaching, occurs as

1320-658: 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

1452-743: A distinction needs to be made between lexical items or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning, and grammatical items or function words, which serve mainly to express grammatical relationships between the different words in an utterance. Grammaticalization has been defined as "the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions". Where grammaticalization takes place, nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries , case markers , inflections, and sentence connectives . A well-known example of grammaticalization

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1584-490: 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

1716-401: A form in its grammaticalized morphemic role does not necessarily imply bleaching of its lexical source, and that the two can separate neatly in spite of maintaining identical phonological form: the noun mente is alive and well today in both Italian and Spanish with its meaning 'mind', yet native speakers do not recognize the noun 'mind' in the suffix -mente . The phonetic erosion may bring

1848-448: A general developmental orientation which all (or the large majority) of the cases of grammaticalization have in common, and which can be paraphrased in abstract, general terms, independent of any specific case. The idea of unidirectionality is an important one when trying to predict language change through grammaticalization (and for making the claim that grammaticalization can be predicted). Lessau notes that "unidirectionality in itself

1980-452: A gradual series of individual shifts. The overlapping stages of grammaticalization form a chain, generally called a cline . These shifts generally follow similar patterns in different languages. Linguists do not agree on the precise definition of a cline or on its exact characteristics in given instances. It is believed that the stages on the cline do not always have a fixed position, but vary. However, Hopper and Traugott 's famous pattern for

2112-447: A grammatical form is incorporated into a lexical item but does not itself become a lexical item. An example is the phrase to up the ante, which incorporates the preposition up (a function word) in a verb (a content word) but without up becoming a verb outside of this lexical item. Since it is the entire phrase to up the ante that is the verb, Hopper and Traugott argue that the word up itself cannot be said to have degrammaticalized,

2244-459: A grammatical item is much less likely to move backwards rather than forwards on Hopper & Traugott 's cline of grammaticalization. In the words of Bernd Heine , "grammaticalization is a unidirectional process, that is, it leads from less grammatical to more grammatical forms and constructions". That is one of the strongest claims about grammaticalization, and is often cited as one of its basic principles. In addition, unidirectionality refers to

2376-467: A method along which grammaticality could be measured both synchronically and diachronically. Another important work was Heine and Reh  [ de ] 's Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages (1984). This work focussed on African languages synchronically from the point of view of grammaticalization. They saw grammaticalization as an important tool for describing

2508-438: A more 'reduced' or grammatical form. What Hopper and Traugott mean is that from a diachronic or historical point of view, changes of word forms is seen as a natural process, whereas synchronically, this process can be seen as inevitable instead of historical. The studying and documentation of recurrent clines enable linguists to form general laws of grammaticalization and language change in general. It plays an important role in

2640-520: 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

2772-532: A morpheme loses its intention: From describing a narrow set of ideas, it comes to describe an ever broader range of them, and eventually may lose its meaning altogether". He saw this as one of the two kinds of change that are always associated with grammaticalization (the other being phonetic reduction). For example, both English suffixes -ly (as in bodily and angrily ), and -like (as in catlike or yellow-like ) ultimately come from an earlier Proto-Germanic etymon, *līką , which meant body or corpse . There

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2904-591: A much broader meaning. These other senses of the term are discussed below . The concept was developed in the works of Bopp (1816), Schlegel (1818), Humboldt (1825) and Gabelentz (1891). Humboldt, for instance, came up with the idea of evolutionary language. He suggested that in all languages grammatical structures evolved out of a language stage in which there were only words for concrete objects and ideas. In order to successfully communicate these ideas, grammatical structures slowly came into existence. Grammar slowly developed through four different stages, each in which

3036-695: 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,

3168-500: A phrase like cantare habeo (literally, 'I have got to sing') acquired the sense of futurity (cf. I have to sing). Finally it became the true future tense in almost all Romance languages and the auxiliary became a full-fledged inflection (cf. Spanish cantaré , cantarás , cantará , French je chanterai , tu chanteras , il/elle chantera , Italian canterò , canterai , canterà , 'I will sing', 'you will sing', 's/he will sing'). In some verbs

3300-447: A preposition and a free-standing adverb. Moreover, the morphologically analogous derivational suffix - naga 'stained with' (e.g., gáffenaga 'stained with coffee', oljonaga 'stained with oil') – itself based on the essive case marker *- na – has degrammaticalized into an independent noun naga 'stain'. Linguists have come up with different interpretation of the term 'grammaticalization', and there are many alternatives to

3432-500: A purely phonological change, and evidence that there is a typological difference in the phonetic and phonological consequences of grammaticalization between monosyllabic languages (featuring an obligatory match between syllable and morpheme , with exceptions of either loanwords or derivations like reduplicatives or diminutives , other morphological alternations) vs non-monosyllabic languages (including disyllabic or bisyllabic Austronesian languages, Afro-Asiatic languages featuring

3564-629: 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

3696-447: A result of its low usage, possibly underwent a period of specialization, where it competed with other grammaticalised phrases. After verbs such as said , and more generally in introducing a dependent clause , contemporary English grammar allows the speaker to either include that or to omit it. This construction—as in "I suspect (that) he is right"—is called the zero form when that is not used. While there has been some analysis of

3828-407: 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

3960-758: 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

4092-498: A similar path of grammaticalization, and note the simultaneous existence of the non-grammaticalized Modern English verb to will (e.g. "He will ed himself to continue along the steep path.") or hoteti in Serbo-Croatian ( Hoċu da hodim = I want that I walk). In Latin the original future tense forms (e.g. cantabo ) were dropped when they became phonetically too close to the imperfect forms ( cantabam ). Instead,

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4224-447: 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

4356-418: A view that is challenged to some extent by parallel usages such as to up the bid , to up the payment , to up the deductions , to up the medication , by the fact that in all cases the can be replaced by a possessive (my, your, her, Bill's, etc.), and by further extensions still: he upped his game 'he improved his performance'. Examples that are not confined to a specific lexical item are less common. One

4488-563: 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

4620-409: Is a predictive assertion in that it selects the general type of possible development (it predicts the direction of any given incipient case)," and unidirectionality also rules out an entire range of development types that do not follow this principle, hereby limiting the amount of possible paths of development. Although unidirectionality is a key element of grammaticalization, exceptions exist. Indeed,

4752-466: 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

4884-610: 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

5016-407: 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

5148-538: 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

5280-590: 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 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

5412-455: Is in fact no longer a flexional form...historically attested facts show us in the most unequivocal way a development - not, indeed, from an originally self-existent word to a mere flexional ending, but the exactly opposite development of what was an inseparable part of a complicated flexional system to greater and greater emancipation and independence. Traugott cites a counterexample from function to content word proposed by Kate Burridge (1998):

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5544-765: Is in the orthography of Japanese compound verbs . Many Japanese words are formed by connecting two verbs, as in 'go and ask (listen)' ( 行って聞く , ittekiku ) , and in Japanese orthography lexical items are generally written with kanji (here 行く and 聞く ), while grammatical items are written with hiragana (as in the connecting て ). Compound verbs are thus generally written with a kanji for each constituent verb, but some suffixes have become grammaticalized, and are written in hiragana, such as 'try out, see' ( 〜みる , -miru ) , from 'see' ( 見る , miru ) , as in 'try eating (it) and see' ( 食べてみる , tabetemiru ) . In Grammaticalization (2003) Hopper and Traugott state that

5676-429: Is no salient trace of that original meaning in the present suffixes for the native speaker, but speakers instead treat the more newly-formed suffixes as bits of grammar that help them form new words. One could make the connection between the body or shape of a physical being and the abstract property of likeness or similarity, but only through metonymic reasoning, after one is explicitly made aware of this connection. Once

5808-536: 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

5940-427: Is pronounced either as / ð æ t / (strong form) or / ð ə t / (weak form) according to its grammatical role, with one as a demonstrative and the other as an anaphoric (referencing adverb). In this way, the strong form represents a determining pronoun (such as in "what is that?"), while the weak form is a subordinating word (as in "I think that it's a mistake"). The pronunciation of

6072-424: 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

6204-517: 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

6336-413: Is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us , for example in "let us eat", is reduced to let's as in "let's you and me fight". Here, the phrase has lost its lexical meaning of "allow us" and has become an auxiliary introducing a suggestion, the pronoun 'us' reduced first to a suffix and then to an unanalyzed phoneme. In other areas of linguistics, the term grammaticalization has taken on

6468-482: Is the English genitive -'s, which, in Old English , was a suffix but, in Modern English, is a clitic. As Jespersen (1894) put it, In Modern English ...(compared to OE) the -s is much more independent: it can be separated from its main word by an adverb such as else (somebody else's hat ), by a prepositional clause such as of England (the queen of England's power ), or even by a relative clause such as I saw yesterday (the man I saw yesterday's car)...the English genitive

6600-510: Is the source of modern Romance productive adverb formation, as in Italian chiaramente , and Spanish claramente 'clearly'. In both of those languages, - mente in this usage is interpretable by today's native speakers only as a morpheme signaling 'adverb' and it has undergone no phonological erosion from the Latin source, mente . This example also illustrates that semantic bleaching of

6732-777: 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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6864-978: The Anglic languages in the British Isles , and into the Frisian languages and Low German /Low Saxon on 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

6996-600: 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% 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

7128-485: 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

7260-546: 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

7392-552: 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

7524-578: The Old Church Slavonic verb [xъtěti] Error: {{Lang}}: Non-latn text/Latn script subtag mismatch ( help ) ("to want/to wish") has gone from a content word ( hoće hoditi "s/he wants to walk") to an auxiliary verb in phonetically reduced form ( on/ona će hoditi "s/he will walk") to a clitic ( hoditi će ), and finally to a fused inflection ( hodiće "s/he will walk"). Compare the German verb wollen which has partially undergone

7656-604: 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

7788-518: 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

7920-546: The voiced dental fricative /ð/ may vary , such as being stopped in Cameroonian English , resulting in a pronunciation of [dat] . English language English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family , whose speakers, called Anglophones , originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain . The namesake of the language is the Angles , one of

8052-564: 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

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8184-617: 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

8316-608: 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

8448-524: 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

8580-547: 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

8712-655: 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

8844-557: 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

8976-706: The Germanic branch. It exists on a dialect continuum with Scots and is then most closely related to 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

9108-554: 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

9240-494: 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

9372-533: 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 is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers. English

9504-407: 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,

9636-453: 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

9768-400: 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

9900-500: The category of number, which can be obligatory in some languages or in specific contexts, in the development of articles, and in the development of personal pronouns of some languages. Some linguists, like Heine and Kuteva, stress the fact that even though obligatorification can be seen as an important process, it is not necessary for grammaticalization to take place, and it also occurs in other types of language change. Although these 'parameters of grammaticalization' are often linked to

10032-639: The change from the Old English (OE) verb willan ('to want/to wish') to an auxiliary verb signifying intention in Middle English (ME). In Present-Day English (PDE), this form is even shortened to 'll and no longer necessarily implies intention, but often is simply a mark of future tense (see shall and will ). The PDE verb 'will' can thus be said to have less lexical meaning than its preceding form in OE. The final stage of grammaticalization has happened in many languages. For example, in Serbo-Croatian ,

10164-404: The cline of grammaticalization has both diachronic and synchronic implications. Diachronically (i.e. looking at changes over time), clines represent a natural path along which forms or words change over time. However, synchronically (i.e. looking at a single point in time), clines can be seen as an arrangement of forms along imaginary lines, with at one end a 'fuller' or lexical form and at the other

10296-469: The cline of grammaticalization illustrates the various stages of the form: This particular cline is called "the cline of grammaticality" or the "cycle of categorial downgrading", and it is a common one. In this cline every item to the right represents a more grammatical and less lexical form than the one to its left. It is very common for full verbs to become auxiliaries and eventually inflexional endings. An example of this phenomenon can be seen in

10428-638: 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

10560-466: 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 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

10692-506: The development in Pennsylvania German of the auxiliary wotte of the preterite subjunctive modal welle 'would' (from 'wanted') into a full verb 'to wish, to desire'. In comparison to various instances of grammaticalization, there are relatively few counterexamples to the unidirectionality hypothesis, and they often seem to require special circumstances to occur. One is found in the development of Irish Gaelic with

10824-476: 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

10956-476: 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

11088-401: 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

11220-551: 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

11352-695: 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

11484-408: 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

11616-513: The grammatical structure would be more developed. Though neo-grammarians like Brugmann rejected the separation of language into distinct "stages" in favour of uniformitarian assumptions, they were positively inclined towards some of these earlier linguists' hypotheses. The term "grammaticalization" in the modern sense was coined by the French linguist Antoine Meillet in his L'évolution des formes grammaticales (1912). Meillet's definition

11748-497: The gravestone of William Shakespeare : " Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones ". In Middle English , þe was entirely replaced by þat (among other representations), before again being replaced by the modern that . Among all relative markers in the English language, including who , which , whose , and what , that —through its ancient form of þæt —appears to be the oldest. In Old English translations of Latin (but only sparsely in original Old English texts),

11880-721: 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

12012-479: 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,

12144-407: 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

12276-403: 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

12408-415: The interest for grammaticalization in linguistic studies began to grow again. A greatly influential work in the domain was Christian Lehmann  [ de ] 's Thoughts on Grammaticalization (1982). This was the first work to emphasize the continuity of research from the earliest period to the present, and it provided a survey of the major work in the field. Lehmann also invented a set of 'parameters',

12540-531: 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

12672-475: 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

12804-431: 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

12936-409: The latter seem to be built out of separate stepping-stones which can often be seen in isolation and whose individual outlines are always distinctly recognizable". In the process of grammaticalization, an uninflected lexical word (or content word) is transformed into a grammar word (or function word ). The process by which the word leaves its word class and enters another is not sudden, but occurs by

13068-544: The opportunities and boundaries of grammaticalization. An important and popular topic which is still debated is the question of unidirectionality. It is difficult to capture the term "grammaticalization" in one clear definition (see the 'various views on grammaticalization' section below). However, there are some processes that are often linked to grammaticalization. These are semantic bleaching, morphological reduction, phonetic erosion, and obligatorification. Semantic bleaching, or desemanticization, has been seen from early on as

13200-462: The origin of the first-person-plural pronoun muid (a function word) from the inflectional suffix -mid (as in táimid 'we are') because of a reanalysis based on the verb-pronoun order of the other persons of the verb. Another well-known example is the degrammaticalization of the North Saami abessive ('without') case suffix - haga to the postposition haga 'without' and further to

13332-412: The other languages in the world in typology. Obligatorification occurs when the use of linguistic structures becomes increasingly more obligatory in the process of grammaticalization. Lehmann describes it as a reduction in transparadigmatic variability, by which he means that "the freedom of the language user with regard to the paradigm as a whole" is reduced. Examples of obligatoriness can be found in

13464-431: The phrase þæt an is frequently used—typically meaning "only"—but its origins and characteristics are not well-understood. Frequently, the construction of þæt an was in the original Latin, which referred then to a following clause. The use of þæt an was for cases in which there was exclusivity (to distinguish between general and specific objects), but translators also used it in situations where exclusivity

13596-488: The phrase onmang þæt (translated as "among that") persisted. In the hundreds of years of its existence, it was used infrequently, though the usage was stable. Even in Old English, usage of hwile ("while") was much more commonplace, with its frequency some six times as large as onmang þæt in a surveyed corpus. Onmang þæt experienced grammaticalisation (turning a word into a grammatical marker), and as

13728-426: The possibility of counterexamples, coupled with their rarity, is given as evidence for the general operating principle of unidirectionality. According to Lyle Campbell , however, advocates often minimize the counterexamples or redefine them as not being part of the grammaticalization cline. He gives the example of Hopper and Traugott (1993), who treat some putative counterexamples as cases of lexicalization in which

13860-426: 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

13992-499: The process went further and produced irregular forms—cf. Spanish haré (instead of * haceré , 'I'll do') and tendré (not * teneré , 'I'll have'; the loss of e followed by epenthesis of d is especially common)—and even regular forms (in Italian, the change of the a in the stem cantare to e in canterò has affected the whole class of conjugation type I verbs). An illustrative example of this cline

14124-411: The reconstruction of older states of a language. Moreover, the documenting of changes can help to reveal the lines along which a language is likely to develop in the future. The unidirectionality hypothesis is the idea that grammaticalization, the development of lexical elements into grammatical ones, or less grammatical into more grammatical, is the preferred direction of linguistic change and that

14256-678: 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

14388-509: The relative frequency of Old and Middle English usage of the zero form, these studies are of limited value, since they rely on unique text corpora , failing to give a general view of its usage. In the late period of Middle English, the linguist Norihiko Otsu determined, the zero form was generally as popular as the form in which that is included. The zero form was common in documents closely relating to speech, such as sermons, suggesting spoken English often omitted that in these contexts. That

14520-449: The role of the modern that . It also took on the role of the modern word what , though this has since changed, and that has recently replaced some usage of the modern which . Pronunciation of the word varies according to its role within a sentence, with a strong form, / ð æ t / and a weak form, / ð ə t / . The word that serves several grammatical purposes. Owing to its wide versatility in usage,

14652-429: The second half of the twentieth century, the field of linguistics was strongly concerned with synchronic studies of language change, with less emphasis on historical approaches such as grammaticalization. It did however, mostly in Indo-European studies , remain an instrument for explaining language change. It was not until the 1970s, with the growth of interest in discourse analysis and linguistic universals , that

14784-468: 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

14916-474: 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

15048-405: The speaker's tendency to follow the principle of least effort , while others think that erosion is a sign of changes taking place. However, phonetic erosion, a common process of language change that can take place with no connection to grammaticalization, is not a necessary property of grammaticalization. For example, the Latin construction of the type clarā mente , meaning 'with a clear mind'

15180-455: 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

15312-405: The theory of grammaticalization. Janda, for example, wrote that "given that even writers on grammaticalization themselves freely acknowledge the involvement of several distinct processes in the larger set of phenomena, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the notion of grammaticalization, too, tends to represent an epiphenomenal telescoping. That is, it may involve certain typical "path(way)s", but

15444-456: The theory, linguists such as Bybee et al. (1994) have acknowledged that independently, they are not essential to grammaticalization. In addition, most are not limited to grammaticalization but can be applied in the wider context of language change. Critics of the theory of grammaticalization have used these difficulties to claim that grammaticalization has no independent status of its own, that all processes involved can be described separately from

15576-458: The vocabularies of other languages. This influence of English has led to concerns about language death , and to claims of linguistic imperialism , and has provoked resistance to the spread of English; however the number of speakers continues to increase because many people around the world think that English provides them with opportunities for better employment and improved lives. Grammaticalisation For an understanding of this process,

15708-473: 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

15840-549: The workings of languages and their universal aspects and it provided an exhaustive list of the pathways of grammaticalization. The great number of studies on grammaticalization in the last decade (up to 2018) show grammaticalization remains a popular item and is regarded as an important field within linguistic studies in general. Among recent publications there is a wide range of descriptive studies trying to come up with umbrella definitions and exhaustive lists, while others tend to focus more on its nature and significance, questioning

15972-785: 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

16104-539: 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,

16236-438: 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

16368-412: The writer Joseph Addison named it "that jacksprat" in 1771, and gave this example of a grammatically correct sentence: "That that I say is this: that that that that gentleman has advanced, is not that, that he should have proved." That can be used as a demonstrative pronoun , demonstrative adjective , conjunction , relative word , and an intensifier . In Old English , that did not exist, and

16500-449: Was "the attribution of grammatical character to an erstwhile autonomous word". Meillet showed that what was at issue was not the origins of grammatical forms but their transformations. He was thus able to present a notion of the creation of grammatical forms as a legitimate study for linguistics. Later studies in the field have further developed and altered Meillet's ideas and have introduced many other examples of grammaticalization. During

16632-405: 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

16764-414: Was already given through other syntactical elements of the sentence. In these texts, þæt seems to be used pleonastically (redundantly), and it began to be used as an independent adverb. In the context of weather events, þæt was never used, such as in the example sentence þæt rigneð (translated as "that rains"). Similarly, for several centuries in Old English and early Middle English texts,

16896-518: 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

17028-484: Was later replaced by wh- words. Where þe had only stood in for subjects of a clause, þæt instead took on the role of both a subject and an object, and when þe and þæt were both used, þæt was always relative in orientation. The symbol ꝥ ( [REDACTED] ) was used as an abbreviation, before it was phased out by the Romantic þ . Similarly, yͭ was a ligature to represent that , as seen in

17160-505: 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

17292-437: Was only represented by þe . It originated in the north of England sometime before the 1200s and spread around the country in the thirteenth century; it then rapidly became the dominant demonstrative pronoun. Before the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham , þæt was normally regularized as þe in writing, but by the time Ælfric lived, þæt was common. As a pronoun, þæt was widely used in Old English, though it

17424-533: 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

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