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The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common ancestry, history, and culture. [7] The English identity began with the Anglo-Saxons , when they were known as the Angelcynn , meaning race or tribe of the Angles .
According to some scholars, a national identity of the English as the people or ethnic group dominant in England can be traced to the Anglo-Saxon period.. For Lindy Brady and Marc Morris, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the construction of Offa's Dyke exemplifies the establishment of such an identity as early as AD 731, becoming a national identity with the unification ...
The distinction between the meaning of the terms citizenship and nationality is not always clear in the English language and differs by country. Generally, nationality refers to a person's legal belonging to a sovereign state and is the common term used in international treaties when addressing members of a country, while citizenship usually means the set of rights and duties a person has in ...
An English presence in North America began with the Roanoke Colony and Colony of Virginia in the late-16th century, but the first successful English settlement was established in 1607, on the James River at Jamestown. By the 1610s an estimated 1,300 English people had travelled to North America, the "first of many millions from the British ...
The Act also extended the Law of England to both England and Wales and made English the only permissible language for official purposes. This had the effect of creating an English-speaking ruling class amongst the Welsh, at a time when Welsh was the language of the great majority. Wales was also now represented in Parliament at Westminster.
Nation-building is a long evolutionary process, and in most cases the date of a country's "formation" cannot be objectively determined; e.g., the fact that England and France were sovereign kingdoms on equal footing in the medieval period does not prejudice the fact that England is not now a sovereign state (having passed sovereignty to Great ...
As of 2024, there are 57 sovereign states and 28 non-sovereign entities where English is an official language. Many administrative divisions have declared English an official language at the local or regional level. Most states where English is an official language are former territories of the British Empire.
The last country officially made a Dominion was Ceylon in 1948. [ 80 ] When the British Nationality Act 1948 entered into force on 1 January 1949, the former Dominions became fully independent, and adopted their own legislation governing nationality.