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See English language word origins and List of English words of French origin. Although English is a Germanic language, it has a deep connection to Romance languages. The roots of this connection trace back to the Conquest of England by the Normans in 1066.
Language portal; Linguistics portal; This category covers History of the English language, primarily: Old English; Middle English; Modern English; Generally it does not cover the evolution of dialects, pidgins, constructed languages, and so on. See also: Category:Dialects of English; Category:Forms of English
It shows how language evolves as a process of 'competition-and-selection', and how certain linguistic features emerge. [2] The Dynamic Model illustrates how the histories and ecologies will determine language structures in the different varieties of English, and how linguistic and social identities are maintained.
The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. [1] However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.
According to monogenesis, human language arose only once in a single community, and all current languages come from the first original tongue. On the other hand, according to polygenesis, human languages came into being in several communities independently, and current tongues derived from different sources. [1]
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
As of 2016, 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. [70] English is the largest language by number of speakers . English is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans.
The Symbolic Species is a 1997 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon on the evolution of language. [1] [2] Combining perspectives from neurobiology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, and semiotics, Deacon proposes that language, along with the unique human capacity for symbolic thought, co-evolved with the brain.