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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 Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain after its Roman occupiers left.
Most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible, even though about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. [12] The grammar of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order , and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German .
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.
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.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house.
American English and British English (BrE) often differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary, and, to a much lesser extent, grammar and orthography. The first large American dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, known as Webster's Dictionary, was written by Noah Webster in 1828, codifying several of these ...
English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world.The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. [1] The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English.
An advanced English syntax based on the principles and requirements of the Grammatical society. London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & co. A new edition of An advanced English syntax, prepared from the author's materials by B. D. H. Miller, was published as Modern English syntax in 1971. Palmer, F. R. (1974). The English verb. London: Longman.