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The English language

The report outlines the origins, global reach, influential figures, and cultural phenomena of the English language. Originating from the Angles tribe in the 5th century, English has evolved through historical periods and is now the most widely spoken language worldwide with over 2 billion speakers. Key contributors like Shakespeare and Webster have significantly shaped its development, while ongoing changes reflect its adaptability and growth.

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Uliana Sudoma
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19 views

The English language

The report outlines the origins, global reach, influential figures, and cultural phenomena of the English language. Originating from the Angles tribe in the 5th century, English has evolved through historical periods and is now the most widely spoken language worldwide with over 2 billion speakers. Key contributors like Shakespeare and Webster have significantly shaped its development, while ongoing changes reflect its adaptability and growth.

Uploaded by

Uliana Sudoma
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A report on ‘English language’

Plan:
1. Origins (the time the language formed as such from a dialect) - made by
Iryna Batyr
2. Territories, the number of speakers - made by Victoria Melnyk
3. People who changed the English language - made by Sofia Kizyma
4. Cultural phenomena - made by Yana Gutnyk

1. The term "English" is derived from ‘Anglisc’, the speech of the Angles—one
of the three Germanic tribes that invaded England during the 5th century.
English derived from a Proto-Indo-European language spoken by nomads
wandering Europe about 5,000 years ago. German also came from this language.
English is conventionally divided into three major historical periods: Old English,
Middle English, and Modern English. Old English was brought to the British Isles
by Germanic people: the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, starting in 449. With the
establishment of centers of learning in Winchester, history being written, and the
translation of important Latin texts into West Saxon's dialect in the 800s, the
dialect spoken there became the official "Old English." Adopted words came from
Scandinavian languages.

2. English is the largest language by number of speakers, and the third most-
spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish. It is the
most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of
the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. There are more people who
have learned it as a second language than there are native speakers. As of 2005, it
was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English. English is the
majority native language in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, an official and the main language of
Singapore, and it is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, South
Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. It is a co-official language of the United
Nations, the European Union and many other world and regional international
organisations. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at
least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch. English speakers are called
"Anglophones". Variability among the accents and dialects of English used in
different countries and regions—in terms of phonetics and phonology, and
sometimes also vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and spelling—does not typically
prevent understanding by speakers of other dialects, although mutual
unintelligibility can occur at extreme ends of the dialect continuum.

3. 6 People Who Changed the English Language Forever


English is a wonderfully flexible language, a kind of linguistic free-for-all, where
words have dropped in and out over the centuries, from a huge variety of sources.
I’d like to pay your attention to some people who permanently altered the English
language and who have greatly influenced the language we speak today.
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare was the linguistic equivalent of “if you want it done right, do it
yourself.” If there wasn’t an existing word for a concept in his play, he made one
up. Shakespeare invented over 400 words that we still use to this day, including
"obscene," "gossip," "blanket," "critic," and "gloomy."
Samuel Johnson
It’s hard to imagine a world without reliable dictionaries, but that is the world in
which Samuel Johnson grew up. This was becoming a problem by the mid-
eighteenth century when European languages were anything but organised. English
in particular was a mess.
Different countries solved the problem differently: in France and Italy linguists
were making up dictionaries for 30 and 30 years. Johnson, working with six
assistants, completed his dictionary in around 8 years! It wasn’t the first English
dictionary, but it was comprehensive and influential. One of the most memorable
phrases include belly-god, “one who makes a god of his belly”.
Noah Webster
Noah Webster believed that a great nation such as the USA needed a language of
its own: American. Or American English anyway. He is personally responsible for
many of the spelling differences between British and American English, including
the single “l” in traveler, the “er” in center and the “or” in flavor.
Webster made these changes in his dictionaries because he wanted English
spelling to be more logical and less influenced by French. Instead he made it more
complicated.
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens did make up some words, but he’s better known for his language
deformations. Dickens was the 19th-century equivalent of the internet. He was the
king of turning common nouns into creative modifiers. Without Dickens
popularizing slang in his novels, we would have lost words such as "angry-eyed,"
"hunger-worn," "proud-stomached," "fancy-dressed," "ginger-beery"and "devil-
may-care."
Dr. Seuss
Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, is someone you’d expect to see
on a list of made-up words. Some of them are silly, meaningless words such as
"zummers" and "sneedle," while others have caught on — like "nerd." Dr. Seuss
didn’t only invent words, he also contributed to changing the reading education
system with his books, created fun rhymes and lovable characters.
Mary Ann Evans
We all probably know her better by her pen name, George Eliot. She had less to
do with creating new words and more of a reputation for creating a new usage of
the term. For example, "Luncheon" was already a midday meal when she began to
use the more specific “lunch-time.” She commonly expanded the definition of
words, such as when she used the word "Siberia" as a metaphor for a remote,
undesirable locale and not the specific geographical location.
Some more interesting personalities that influenced the English language include:
· Ray Kroc. The man responsible for the international success of McDonald’s
and therefore the McPrefix;
· Snoop Dogg. A lot of people think he has added a certain fizzle to English,
although anyone over the age of 20 should use with caution his style of
language.

4. Cultural phenomena
English is the mother tongue of more than 325 million native speakers, the total
number of speakers exceeds 500 million, the total number of people who speak
English to some extent exceeds 1 billion.
There was such a phenomenon in English language as a Shakespeare's
phenomenon. William Shakespeare is an outstanding writer of the 16th century. He
was the one, who invented and then used in his works about 1,000 new English
words. And one more interesting and incredible fact is that contemporaries still use
them. Here are just a few: Addiction, cold-blooded, break the ice, lonely, birth
place, blushing, manager, eyeball, fashionable, uncomfortable, torture, etc.
Another phenomenon of the English language is the tendency to simplify.
Earlier, the English alphabet had 29 letters, instead of 26, as today. English
alphabet has decreased over the years. Earlier in English there were masculine and
feminine. But the grammar has been simplified and now they do not exist. And it
makes English much easier to learn.
English is developing very fast. Every 2 minutes a new English word is added
to the Oxford Dictionary. But at the same time there are the oldest words in
English, which are still popular.For example: I, love, black, town, we, two, three,
mother, fire, hand, hear. Some of these words date back 900 years.
In English, the pronoun “they” may be used in the singular. This rule appeared
because feminists were dissatisfied with the use of the pronoun “he/him/his” in
English when the speaker did not know the person they were talking about.
Today, there are about 1,000,000 words in English. But there is no need to
know them all, because the average English speaker knows 20,000 to 30,000
words. English has the largest number of synonyms.
Few people know the origin of the word “goodbye”, that the British use as a
farewell. For a long time, the farewell "God be with ye" was popular in Old
English, and its abbreviated and distorted version has survived to the present days.

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