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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. [4][5][6] The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain.
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, [1][2] making it the largest language by number of speakers, the third largest language by number of native speakers and the most ...
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
e. English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern ...
The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total English-speaking population of the European Union and the United Kingdom combined (2012) is 256,876,220 [66] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [67] i.e. 51%) including 65,478,252 native speakers and 191,397,968 non-native speakers, and would be ranked 2nd if it were included.
The three largest recognisable dialect groups in England are Southern English dialects, Midlands English dialects and Northern England English dialects. The most prominent isogloss is the foot–strut split, which runs roughly from mid- Shropshire (on the Welsh border) to south of Birmingham and then to the Wash. South of the isogloss (the ...
American English (AmE), sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, [b] is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. [4] English is the most widely spoken language in the United States; the de facto common language used in government, education and commerce; and an official language of most U.S. states (32 out of 50). [5]
British English (abbreviations: BrE, en-GB, and BE) [3] is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. [6] More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as ...