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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 Spanish language, which is widespread in the Americas, typically received loanwards from British English (often through French) until the 1950s, when American English's influence became more prominent.
Braj Kachru divides the use of English into three concentric circles. [8]The inner circle is the traditional base of English and includes countries such as the United Kingdom and Ireland and the anglophone populations of the former British colonies of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and various islands of the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Ocean.
The authors found that English remained at 45 percent of content for 2005 to the end of the study but believe this was due to the bias of search engines indexing more English-language content rather than a true stabilization of the percentage of content in English on the World Wide Web. [2] The number of non-English web pages is rapidly expanding.
Early Modern English and Late Modern English, also called Present-Day English (PDE), differ essentially in vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from the Industrial Revolution and technologies that created a need for new words, as well as international development of the language.
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 widespread language geographically.
The spread of English multilingualism is not isolated to the somewhat recent confines of globalization, but has a long colonial history as well. [12] Suhanthie Motha argues that centuries of widespread colonial domination, exploitation, and deliberate English spread have led to modern-day epistemologies about empire and language value. [12]
In 1349, English became the language of instruction at the University of Oxford, which had taught in French or Latin. In 1476, the use of English became widespread through the introduction of printing to England by William Caxton. Henry IV (1367-1413) was the first English king whose first language was English.