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The Future of English? A guide to forecasting the popularity of the English language in the 21st century. London: British Council. Available for free from the website of the British Council. Graddol, David (1999). The decline of the native speaker. In Graddol, David/Meinhof, Ulrike (eds). English in a Changing World. AILA Review 13, 57–68.
Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) [2] or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, which began in the late 14th century and was completed by the 17th century.
Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms , and word order was much freer than in Modern English.
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.
The future of language has been a popular topic of speculation by novelists, futurists, journalists and linguists since the 19th century. American linguist and author John McWhorter projects that by the early 2100s only 600 to 700 languages will be in widespread daily use, with English remaining as the dominant world language.
Modern English spelling developed from about 1350 onwards, when—after three centuries of Norman French rule—English gradually became the official language of England again, although very different from before 1066, having incorporated many words of French origin (battle, beef, button, etc.).
The modern Frisian language is the closest-sounding language to the English used approximately 2,000 years ago, when the people from what is now the north of the Netherlands travelled to what would become England, and pushed the Celtic language—ancestor of modern Welsh— to the western side of the island. Words like "blue" can be recognised ...
The Turkish language has become more open to English influences due to Turkey's Westernisation in the early 20th century and adoption of the Latin alphabet. [ 39 ] Because English is among the most common languages in Israel, it has also influenced Modern Hebrew , [ 40 ] though it has less presence in the Arab areas. [ 41 ]