English language

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colspan="2" style="text-align:center; font-size:125%; font-weight:bold; padding:0.5em; background-color: C2E0C2; color: 1|white|black }};" | English
Native to	The English-speaking world, including the Template:Enum
Speakers	L1: 380 million  (2021) L2: 1.077 billion (2021) Total: 1.457 billion
Early form	Proto-English
Dialects	British English (full list)
Writing system	Latin (English alphabet) Anglo-Saxon runes (historical) English Braille, Unified English Braille
Signed forms	Manually coded English Template:Nwr
colspan="2" style="text-align:center; background:#E7E7FF;"	Official language in	Template:Ubli
Regulated by	None, unregulated
Language codes
ISO 639-1	en
ISO 639-2	eng
ISO 639-3	eng
Glottolog	stan1293
Linguasphere	52-ABA
		Template:Legend
IPA

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that emerged in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn The language is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influence of the British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the rise of the United States. It is the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second‑language speakers than native speakers. However, English is only the third‑most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

English is either the official language, or one of the official languages, of 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language in the world. In the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, it is the dominant language for historical reasons without being explicitly defined by law. It is a co‑official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and many other international and regional organisations. It has also become the de facto lingua franca of diplomacy, science, technology, international trade, logistics, tourism, aviation, entertainment, and the Internet. Ethnologue estimated that there were over 1.4 billion speakers worldwide as of 2021.

Old English emerged from a group of West Germanic dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Early inscriptions were written with runes before a Latin‑based alphabet was adopted for longer texts. Late Old English borrowed some grammar and core vocabulary from Old Norse, a North Germanic language.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn An evolution of the Latin alphabet, the English alphabet, fully supplanted the runic alphabet by the High Middle Ages, coinciding with the emergence of Middle English in England under Norman control. Middle English borrowed vocabulary extensively from French dialects, which are the source of approximately 28 per cent of Modern English words, and from Latin, which is the source of an additional 28 per cent. While Latin and the Romance languages are thus the source for a majority of its lexicon taken as a whole, English's grammar and phonology remain Germanic, as does most of its basic everyday vocabulary. Finally, Middle English transformed, in part through the Great Vowel Shift, into Modern English, which exists on a dialect continuum with Scots; it is next most closely related to Low Saxon and Frisian.

Classification

English is a member of the Indo-European language family, belonging to the West Germanic branch of Germanic languages.Template:Sfn Owing to their descent from a shared ancestor, Proto-Germanic, English and other Germanic languagesTemplate:Sndwhich include Dutch, German, and SwedishTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sndshare characteristic features, including a division of verbs into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs, and sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants known as Grimm's and Verner's laws.Template:Sfn

Old English was one of several Ingvaeonic languages, which emerged from a dialect continuum spoken by West Germanic peoples during the 5th century in Frisia, on the coast of the North Sea. Old English emerged among the Ingvaeonic speakers on the British Isles following their migration to the region, while the other Ingvaeonic languages (Frisian and Old Low German) developed in parallel on the European continent.Template:Sfn Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern English.Template:Sfn Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into other Anglic languages, including ScotsTemplate:Sfn and the extinct Fingallian and Yola dialects of Ireland.Template:Sfn

English was isolated from other Germanic languages on the continent and diverged considerably in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology as a result. It is not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic languageTemplate:Sndthough some, such as Dutch and Frisian, share strong affinities with it, particularly in its earlier stages.Template:Sfn English and Frisian were traditionally considered more closely related to one another than they were to other West Germanic languages, but most modern scholarship does not recognise a particular affinity between them. Though they shared similar sound changes that were found nowhere else around the North Sea at that time, the specific changes appeared in English and Frisian at different timesTemplate:Snda pattern that is uncharacteristic of languages that share a unique phylogenetic ancestor.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn