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English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following ...
Despite the importance of English as an international lingua franca in Europe, Europe is also linguistically diverse, and minority languages are protected, e.g. by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages founded in the 1990s. This underlines that the popular view of "one nation = one language" (cf. Wirrer 2003) is mostly false.
[not verified in body] [4] [page range too broad] English borrowed many words from Old Norse, the North Germanic language of the Vikings, [5] and later from Norman French, the Romance language of the Normans, which descends from Latin. Estimates of native words derived from Old English range up to 33%, [6] with the rest made up of outside ...
Euro English, [1] Euro-English, [2] or European English, less commonly known as EU English, Continental English, and EU Speak, is a group of dialects of the English language and a form of International English as used in Europe based on common lexical and grammatical mistranslations influenced by the native languages of its non-native English-speaking population mostly built on the technical ...
English is also commonly used in Cyprus to communicate with foreign visitors. The large number of British tourists (and other, largely Northern European ones, who use English as a lingua franca) who visit Cyprus regularly has contributed largely to the continued use of English on Cyprus, especially in its thriving tourist industry.
definite and indefinite articles (e.g. English the vs. a/an) postnominal relative clauses with inflected relative pronouns that signal the role of the head in the clause (e.g. English who vs. whose) a periphrastic perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle (e.g. English I have said);
English spelling consistency was dealt a further blow when William Caxton brought the printing press to London in 1476. Having lived in mainland Europe for the preceding 30 years, his grasp of the English spelling system had become uncertain. The Belgian assistants whom he brought to help him set up his business had an even poorer command of it ...
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 [69] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [70] 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.