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English language

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For other uses, see English (disambiguation).
Pronunciation /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]
Region Originally Britain
now worldwide (see Geographical distribution, below)
Native speakers
360–400 million (2006)[2]
L2 speakers: 400 million;
as a foreign language: 600–700 million[2]
Early forms
Manually coded English
(multiple systems)
Official status
Official language in
Language codes
ISO 639-1 en
ISO 639-2 eng
ISO 639-3 eng
Glottolog stan1293[3]
Linguasphere 52-ABA
  Countries of the world where English is a majority native language
  Countries where English is official but not a majority native language

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now a global lingua franca.[4][5] Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, it ultimately derives its name from the Anglia (Angeln) peninsula in the Baltic Sea. Its vocabulary is primarily influenced by other Germanic and Romance languages, particularly by the French language.[6] English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the most commonly spoken language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand, and is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia.[7] It is the third most common native language in the world, after Mandarin and Spanish.[8] It is the most widely learned second language and an official language of the United Nations, of the European Union, and of many other world and regional international organisations. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch

English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. 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. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England, and was a period in which the language was influenced by French.[9] Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the King James Bible, and the start of the Great Vowel Shift.[10] Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, modern English spread around the world from the 17th to mid-20th centuries. Through all types of printed and electronic media, as well as the emergence of the United States as a global superpower, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and in professional contexts such as science, navigation, and law.[11]

Modern English has little inflection compared with many other languages, and relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation. Despite noticeable variation among the accents and dialects of English used in different countries and regions – in terms of phonetics and phonology, and sometimes also vocabulary, grammar and spelling – English-speakers from around the world are able to communicate with one another with relative ease.


The Germanic languages in Europe

English is an Indo-European language, and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages.[12] Most closely related to English are the Frisian languages, and English and Frisian form the Anglo-Frisian subgroup within West Germanic. Old Saxon and its descendent Low German languages are also closely related, and sometimes Low German, English, and Frisian are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic languages.[13] Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English.[14] Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other English (Anglic) languages, including Scots[15] and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy (Yola) dialects of Ireland.[16]

English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares new language features (different from other Indo-European languages) with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German, and Swedish.[17] These shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Germanic. Some shared features of Germanic languages are the use of modal verbs, the division of verbs into strong and weak classes, and the sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants, known as Grimm's and Verner's laws. Through Grimm's law, the word for foot begins with /f/ in Germanic languages, but its cognates in other Indo-European languages begin with /p/. English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic (see Phonological history of Old English § Palatalization).[18]

  • English sing, sang, sung; Dutch zingen, zong, gezongen; German singen, sang, gesungen (strong verb)
English laugh, laughed; Dutch and German lachen, lachte (weak verb)
Latin pes, stem ped-; Modern Greek πόδι pódi; Russian под pod; Sanskrit पद् pád (original Proto-Indo-European *p)
German Käse and Dutch kaas (k without palatalisation)

English, like the other insular Germanic languages, Icelandic and Faroese, developed independently of the continental Germanic languages and their influences. English is thus not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic language, differing in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, although some, such as Dutch, do show strong affinities with English, especially with its earlier stages.[19]

Because English through its history has changed considerably in response to contact with other languages, particularly Old Norse and Norman French, some scholars have argued that English can be considered a mixed language or a creole – a theory called the Middle English creole hypothesis. Although the high degree of influence from these languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed language.[20][21]


Proto-Germanic to Old English

Main article: Old English

The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c. 550–1066 CE). Old English developed from a set of North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland, and Southern Sweden by Germanic tribes known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. In the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain and the Romans withdrew from Britain. By the seventh century, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in Britain, replacing the languages of Roman Britain (43–409 CE): Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, and Latin, brought to Britain by the Roman occupation.[22][23][24] England and English (originally Englaland and Englisc) are named after the Angles.[25]

Old English was divided into four dialects: the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon.[26] Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the ninth century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety.[27] The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Cædmon's Hymn, is written in Northumbrian.[28] Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the early period of Old English were written using a runic script.[29] By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms. It included the runic letters wynn <ƿ> and thorn <þ>, and the modified Latin letters eth <ð>, and ash <æ>.[29][30]



Foxas habbað holu and heofonan fuglas nest
"Foxes have holes and the birds of heaven nests"[34]

Middle English

Main article: Middle English



John of Trevisa, ca. 1385[35]



With the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the now norsified Old English language was subject to contact with the Old Norman language, a Romance language closely related to Modern French. The Norman language in England eventually developed into Anglo-Norman. Because Norman was spoken primarily by the elites and nobles, while the lower classes continued speaking Anglo-Saxon, the influence of Norman consisted of introducing a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains.[37] Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar. The distinction between nominative and accusative case was lost except in personal pronouns, the instrumental case was dropped, and the use of the genitive case was limited to describing possession. The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms,[38] and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible.[39] By the Wycliffe Bible of the 1380s, the passage Matthew 8:20 was written

Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heuene han nestis[40]



Early Modern English

Main article: Early Modern English



English began to rise in prestige during the reign of Henry V. Around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents, and a new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard, developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands. In 1476, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England and began publishing the first printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English.[43] Literature from the Early Modern period includes the works of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I. Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the consonant clusters /kn gn sw/ in knight, gnat, and sword were still pronounced. Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic represent the distinct characteristics of Early Modern English.[44]


The Foxes haue holes and the birds of the ayre haue nests[34]


Spread of Modern English

By the late 18th century, the British Empire had facilitated the spread of English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication.[45][46] As England continued to form new colonies, these in turn became independent and developed their own norms for how to speak and write the language. English was adopted in North America, India, parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions. In the post-colonial period, some of the newly created nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others.[47][48][49] In the 20th century the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC[50] and other broadcasters, significantly accelerated the spread of the language across the planet.[51][52] By the 21st century, English was more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.[53]



Geographical distribution

As of 2010, 359 million people spoke English as their first language. English is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish.[8] However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world.[53][59] English is spoken by communities on every continent and on oceanic islands in all the major oceans.[60] The countries in which English is spoken can be grouped into different categories by how English is used in each country. The "inner circle"[61] countries with many native speakers of English share an international standard of written English and jointly influence speech norms of English around the world. English does not belong to just one country, and it does not belong solely to descendants of English settlers. English is an official language of countries populated by few descendants of native speakers of English. It has also become by far the most important language of international communication when people who share no native language meet anywhere in the world.

Three circles of English-speaking countries


Countries with large communities of native speakers of English (the inner circle) include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English. The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the United States (at least 231 million),[63] the United Kingdom (60 million),[64][65][66] Canada (19 million),[67] Australia (at least 17 million),[68] South Africa (4.8 million),[69] Ireland (4.2 million), and New Zealand (3.7 million).[70] In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents, and local people who speak other languages or new immigrants learn English to communicate in their neighbourhoods and workplaces.[71] The inner-circle countries provide the base from which English spreads to other countries in the world.[62]

Estimates of the number of English speakers who are second language and foreign-language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1,000 million depending on how proficiency is defined.[7] Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.[59] In Kachru's three-circles model, the "outer circle" countries are countries such as the Philippines,[72] Jamaica,[73] India, Pakistan[citation needed], Singapore,[74] and Nigeria[75][76] with a much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English as a second language for education, government, or domestic business, and where English is routinely used for school instruction and official interactions with the government.[77] Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English in the process of growing up through day by day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by speakers who are not native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners.[71] Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries,[71] and they may have grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.[71]

In the three-circles model, countries such as Poland, China, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries where English is taught as a foreign language make up the "expanding circle".[78] The distinctions between English as a first language, as a second language, and as a foreign language are often debatable and may change in particular countries over time.[77] For example, in the Netherlands and some other countries of Europe, knowledge of English as a second language is nearly universal, with over 80 percent of the population able to use it,[79] and thus English is routinely used to communicate with foreigners and often in higher education. In these countries, although English is not used for government business, the widespread use of English in these countries puts them at the boundary between the "outer circle" and "expanding circle". English is unusual among world languages in how many of its users are not native speakers but speakers of English as a second or foreign language.[80] Many users of English in the expanding circle use it to communicate with other people from the expanding circle, so that interaction with native speakers of English plays no part in their decision to use English.[81] Non-native varieties of English are widely used for international communication, and speakers of one such variety often encounter features of other varieties.[82] Very often today a conversation in English anywhere in the world may include no native speakers of English at all, even while including speakers from several different countries.[83]

Circle frame.svg


  US (64.3%)
  UK (16.7%)
  Canada (5.3%)
  Australia (4.7%)
  South Africa (1.3%)
  Ireland (1.1%)
  New Zealand (1%)
  Other (5.6%)

Pluricentric English

English is a pluricentric language, which means that no one national authority sets the standard for use of the language.[84][85][86][87] But English is not a divided language,[88] despite a long-standing joke originally attributed to George Bernard Shaw that the United Kingdom and the United States are "two countries separated by a common language".[89] Spoken English, for example English used in broadcasting, generally follows national pronunciation standards that are also established by custom rather than by regulation. International broadcasters are usually identifiable as coming from one country rather than another through their accents,[90] but newsreader scripts are also composed largely in international standard written English. The norms of standard written English are maintained purely by the consensus of educated English-speakers around the world, without any oversight by any government or international organisation.[91] American listeners generally readily understand most British broadcasting, and British listeners readily understand most American broadcasting. Most English speakers around the world can understand radio programmes, television programmes, and films from many parts of the English-speaking world.[92] Both standard and nonstandard varieties of English can include both formal or informal styles, distinguished by word choice and syntax and use both technical and non-technical registers.[93]

The settlement history of the English-speaking inner circle countries outside Britain helped level dialect distinctions and produce a koineised form of English in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.[94] The majority of immigrants to the United States without British ancestry rapidly adopted English after arrival. Now the majority of the United States population are monolingual English speakers,[95][63] although English has been given official status by only 30 of the 50 state governments of the US.[96][97]

English as a global language

English has ceased to be an "English language" in the sense of belonging only to people who are ethnically English.[98][99] Use of English is growing country-by-country internally and for international communication. Most people learn English for practical rather than ideological reasons.[100] Many speakers of English in Africa have become part of an "Afro-Saxon" language community that unites Africans from different countries.[101]

As decolonisation proceeded throughout the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, former colonies often did not reject English but rather continued to use it as independent countries setting their own language policies.[48][49][102] For example, the view of the English language among many Indians has gone from associating it with colonialism to associating it with economic progress, and English continues to be an official language of India.[103] English is also widely used in media and literature, and the number of English language books published annually in India is the third largest in the world after the US and UK.[104] However English is rarely spoken as a first language, numbering only around a couple hundred-thousand people, and less than 5% of the population speak fluent English in India.[105][106] David Crystal claimed in 2004 that, combining native and non-native speakers, India now has more people who speak or understand English than any other country in the world,[107] but the number of English speakers in India is very uncertain, with most scholars concluding that the United States still has more speakers of English than India.[108]

Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca,[51][109] is also regarded as the first world language.[110][111] English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy.[111] English is, by international treaty, the basis for the required controlled natural languages[112] Seaspeak and Airspeak, used as international languages of seafaring[113] and aviation.[114] English has replaced German as the dominant language of scientific research.[115] It achieved parity with French as a language of diplomacy at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919.[116] By the time of the foundation of the United Nations at the end of World War II, English had become pre-eminent [117] and is now the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations.[118] It is one of six official languages of the United Nations.[119] Many other worldwide international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee, specify English as a working language or official language of the organisation.



A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine[122] and computing. English has become so important in scientific publishing that more than 80 percent of all scientific journal articles indexed by Chemical Abstracts in 1998 were written in English, as were 90 percent of all articles in natural science publications by 1996 and 82 percent of articles in humanities publications by 1995.[123]

Specialised subsets of English arise spontaneously in international communities, for example, among international business people, as an auxiliary language. This has led some scholars to develop the study of English as an auxiliary languages. Globish uses a relatively small subset of English vocabulary (about 1500 words with highest use in international business English) in combination with the standard English grammar. Other examples include Simple English.

The increased use of the English language globally has had an effect on other languages, leading to some English words being assimilated into the vocabularies of other languages. This influence of English has led to concerns about language death,[124] and to claims of linguistic imperialism,[125] and has provoked resistance to the spread of English; however the number of speakers continues to increase because many people around the world think that English provides them with opportunities for better employment and improved lives.[126]

Although some scholars mention a possibility of future divergence of English dialects into mutually unintelligible languages, most think a more likely outcome is that English will continue to function as a koineised language in which the standard form unifies speakers from around the world.[127] English is used as the language for wider communication in countries around the world.[128] Thus English has grown in worldwide use much more than any constructed language proposed as an international auxiliary language, including Esperanto.[129][130]


Main article: English phonology

The phonetics and phonology of English differ between dialects, usually without interfering with mutual communication. Phonological variation affects the inventory of phonemes (speech sounds that distinguish meaning), and phonetic variation is differences in pronunciation of the phonemes.[131] This overview mainly describes the standard pronunciations of the United Kingdom and the United States: Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA) (See Section below on "Dialects, accents and varieties"). The phonetic symbols used below are from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).[132][133][134]


Most English dialects share the same 24 consonant phonemes. The consonant inventory shown below is valid for Californian American English,[135] and for RP.[136]

Consonant phonemes
Labial Dental Alveolar Post-
Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ŋ
Stop p b t d k ɡ
Fricative f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h
Approximant ɹ* j w
Lateral l

* Conventionally transcribed /r/.


  • fortis stops: pin [ˈpʰɪn], spin [spɪn], happy [ˈhæpi], nip [ˈnip̚ ] or [ˈniˀp]

In RP, the lateral approximant /l/, has two main allophones (pronunciation variants): the clear or plain [l], as in light, and the dark or velarised [ɫ], as in full.[138] GA has dark l in most cases.[139]

  • clear l: RP light [laɪt]


  • voiceless sonorants: clay [ˈkl̥ɛɪ̯] and snow [ˈsn̥oʊ]
  • syllabic sonorants: paddle [pad.l̩], and button [bʌt.n̩]



RP GA word
i need
ɪ bid
e ɛ bed
æ back
RP GA word
(ɪ) ɨ roses
ə comma
ɜː ɜr bird
ʌ but
RP GA word
u food
ʊ good
ɔː ɔ paw
ɒ cloth
ɑ box
ɑː bra
RP GA word
əʊ road
ɔɪ boy

In RP, vowel length is phonemic; long vowels are marked with a triangular colonː⟩ in the table above, such as the vowel of need [niːd] as opposed to bid [bɪd]. GA does not have long vowels.

In both RP and GA, vowels are phonetically shortened before fortis consonants in the same syllable, like /t tʃ f/, but not before lenis consonants like /d dʒ v/ or in open syllables: thus, the vowels of rich [rɪ̆tʃ], neat [niˑt], and safe [sĕɪ̆f] are noticeably shorter than the vowels of ridge [rɪdʒ], need [niːd], and save [seɪv], and the vowel of light [lăɪ̆t] is shorter than that of lie [laɪ]. Because lenis consonants are frequently voiceless at the end of a syllable, vowel length is an important cue as to whether the following consonant is lenis or fortis.[141]

The vowels /ɨ ə/ only occur in unstressed syllables and are a result of vowel reduction. Some dialects do not distinguish them, so that roses and comma end in the same vowel, a dialect feature called weak vowel merger. GA has an unstressed r-coloured schwa /ɚ/, as in butter [ˈbʌtɚ], which in RP has the same vowel as the word-final vowel in comma.



Stress, rhythm and intonation


Stress in English is phonemic, and some pairs of words are distinguished by stress. For instance, the word contract is stressed on the first syllable (/ˈkɒntrækt/ KON-trakt) when used as a noun, but on the last syllable (/kənˈtrækt/ kən-TRAKT) for most meanings (for example, "reduce in size") when used as a verb.[145][146][147] Here stress is connected to vowel reduction: in the noun "contract" the first syllable is stressed and has the unreduced vowel /ɒ/, but in the verb "contract" the first syllable is unstressed and its vowel is reduced to /ə/. Stress is also used to distinguish between words and phrases, so that a compound word receives a single stress unit, but the corresponding phrase has two: e.g. to búrn óut versus a búrnout, and a hótdog versus a hót dóg.[148]


Regional variation

Dialects and low vowels
word RP GA Can sound change
THOUGHT /ɔ/ /ɔ/ or /ɑ/ /ɑ/ cotcaught merger
CLOTH /ɒ/ lotcloth split
LOT /ɑ/ fatherbother merger
PALM /ɑː/
PLANT /æ/ /æ/ trapbath split
TRAP /æ/

Varieties of English vary the most in pronunciation of vowels, and are categorised generally into two groups: British (BrE) and American (AmE). Because North America was settled in the late 17th century, American and Canadian English had time to diverge greatly from other varieties of English during centuries when transoceanic travel was slow. Australian, New Zealand, and South African English, on the other hand, were settled in the 19th century, shortly before ocean-going steamships became commonplace, so they show close similarities to the English of South East England. The English spoken in Ireland and Scottish English fall between these two groups. Some differences between the various dialects are shown in the table "Varieties of Standard English and their features".[149]




There is complex dialectal variation in words with the open front and open back vowels /æ ɑː ɒ ɔː/. These four vowels are only distinguished in RP, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In GA, these vowels merge to three /æ ɑ ɔ/,[153] and in Canadian English they merge to two /æ ɑ/.[154] In addition, the words that have each vowel vary by dialect. The table "Dialects and open vowels" shows this variation with lexical sets in which these sounds occur.


Main article: English grammar

Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent marking pattern with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, a fairly fixed SVO word order and a complex syntax.[155] Some traits typical of Germanic languages persist in English, such as the distinction between irregularly inflected strong stems inflected through ablaut (i.e. changing the vowel of the stem, as in the pairs speak/spoke and foot/feet) and weak stems inflected through affixation (such as love/loved, hand/hands). Vestiges of the case and gender system are found in the pronoun system (he/him, who/whom) and in the inflection of the copula verb to be. As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment. English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners (i.e. articles), prepositions, and conjunctions. Some analyses add pronouns as a class separate from nouns, and subdivide conjunctions into subordinators and coordinators, and add the class of interjections.[156] English also has a rich set of auxiliary verbs, such as have and do, expressing the categories of mood and aspect. Questions are marked by do-support, wh-movement (fronting of question words beginning with wh-) and word order inversion with some verbs.

The seven word classes are exemplified in this sample sentence:[157]


Nouns and noun phrases



Regular plural formation:

Singular: cat, dog
Plural: cats, dogs

Irregular plural formation:



Possessive constructions:

With -s: The woman's husband's child
With of: The child of the husband of the woman






Pronouns, case and person

English pronouns conserve many traits of case and gender inflection. The personal pronouns retain a difference between subjective and objective case in most persons (I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them) as well as a gender and animateness distinction in the third person singular (distinguishing he/she/it). The subjective case corresponds to the Old English nominative case, and the objective case is used both in the sense of the previous accusative case (in the role of patient, or direct object of a transitive verb), and in the sense of the Old English dative case (in the role of a recipient or indirect object of a transitive verb).[165][166] Subjective case is used when the pronoun is the subject of a finite clause, and otherwise the objective case is used.[167] While grammarians such as Henry Sweet[168] and Otto Jespersen[169] noted that the English cases did not correspond to the traditional Latin based system, some contemporary grammars, for example Huddleston & Pullum (2002), retain traditional labels for the cases, calling them nominative and accusative cases respectively.

Possessive pronouns exist in dependent and independent forms; the dependent form functions as a determiner specifying a noun (as in my chair), while the independent form can stand alone as if it were a noun (e.g. the chair is mine).[170] The English system of grammatical person no longer has a distinction between formal and informal pronouns of address, and the forms for 2nd person plural and singular are identical except in the reflexive form. Some dialects have introduced innovative 2nd person plural pronouns such as y'all found in Southern American English and African American (Vernacular) English or youse and ye found in Irish English.

English personal pronouns
Person Subjective case Objective case Dependent possessive Independent possessive Reflexive
1st p. sg. I me my mine myself
2nd o. sg. you you your yours yourself
1st p. pl. we us our ours ourselves
2nd p. pl. you you your yours yourselves
3rd p. pl they them their theirs themselves




Verbs and verb phrases

English verbs are inflected for tense and aspect, and marked for agreement with third person singular subject. Only the copula verb to be is still inflected for agreement with the plural and first and second person subjects.[163] Auxiliary verbs such as have and be are paired with verbs in the infinitive, past, or progressive forms. They form complex tenses, aspects, and moods. Auxiliary verbs differ from other verbs in that they can be followed by the negation, and in that they can occur as the first constituent in a question sentence.[172][173]


English inflectional forms
Inflection Strong Regular
Plain present take love
3rd person sg.
takes loves
Preterite took loved
Plain (infinitive) take love
Gerund–participle taking loving
Past participle taken loved

Tense, aspect and mood


Present Preterite
First person I run I ran
Third person John runs John ran

English does not have a morphologised future tense.[175] Futurity of action is expressed periphrastically with one of the auxiliary verbs will or shall.[176] Many varieties also use a near future constructed with the phrasal verb be going to.[177]

First person I will run
Third person John will run




Phrasal verbs






Modern English syntax language is moderately analytic.[180] It has developed features such as modal verbs and word order as resources for conveying meaning. Auxiliary verbs mark constructions such as questions, negative polarity, the passive voice and progressive aspect.

Basic constituent order

English word order has moved from the Germanic verb-second (V2) word order to being almost exclusively subject–verb–object (SVO).[181] The combination of SVO order and use of auxiliary verbs often creates clusters of two or more verbs at the centre of the sentence, such as he had hoped to try to open it.

In most sentences English only marks grammatical relations through word order.[182] The subject constituent precedes the verb and the object constituent follows it. The example below demonstrates how the grammatical roles of each constituent is marked only by the position relative to the verb:

The dog bites the man
The man bites the dog


He hit him


Clause syntax

Main article: English clause syntax

In English a sentence may be composed of one or more clauses, that may in turn be composed of one or more phrases (e.g. Noun Phrases, Verb Phrases, and Prepositional Phrases). A clause is built around a verb, and includes its constituents, such as any NPs and PPs. Within a sentence one clause is always the main clause (or matrix clause) whereas other clauses are subordinate to it. Subordinate clauses may function as arguments of the verb in the main clause. For example, in the phrase I think (that) you are lying, the main clause is headed by the verb think, the subject is I, but the object of the phrase is the subordinate clause (that) you are lying. The subordinating conjunction that shows that the clause that follows is a subordinate clause, but it is often omitted.[184] Relative clauses are clauses that function as a modifier or specifier to some constituent in the main clause: For example, in the sentence I saw the letter that you received today, the relative clause that you received today specifies the meaning of the word letter, the object of the main clause. Relative clauses can be introduced by the pronouns who, whose, whom and which as well as by that (which can also be omitted.)[185] In contrast to many other Germanic languages there is no major differences between word order in main and subordinate clauses.[186]

Auxiliary verb constructions







Discourse level syntax





The vocabulary of English is vast, and counting exactly how many words English (or any language) has is impossible.[196][197][198] The Oxford Dictionaries suggest that there are at least a quarter of a million distinct English words.[196] Early studies of English vocabulary by lexicographers, the scholars who formally study vocabulary, compile dictionaries, or both, were impeded by a lack of comprehensive data on actual vocabulary in use from good-quality linguistic corpora,[199] collections of actual written texts and spoken passages. Many statements published before the end of the 20th century about the growth of English vocabulary over time, the dates of first use of various words in English, and the sources of English vocabulary will have to be corrected as new computerised analysis of linguistic corpus data becomes available.[198][200]

Word formation processes

English forms new words from existing words or roots in its vocabulary through a variety of processes. One of the most productive processes in English is conversion,[201] using a word with a different grammatical role, for example using a noun as a verb or a verb as a noun. Another productive word-formation process is nominal compounding,[198][200] producing compound words such as babysitter or ice cream or homesick.[201] A process more common in Old English than in Modern English, but still productive in Modern English, is the use of derivational suffixes (-hood, -ness, -ing, -ility) to derive new words from existing words (especially those of Germanic origin) or stems (especially for words of Latin or Greek origin). Formation of new words, called neologisms, based on Greek or Latin roots (for example television or optometry) is a highly productive process in English and in most modern European languages, so much so that it is often difficult to determine in which language a neologism originated. For this reason, lexicographer Philip Gove attributed many such words to the "international scientific vocabulary" (ISV) when compiling Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961). Another active word-formation process in English is acronyms,[202] words formed by pronouncing as a single word abbreviations of longer phrases (e.g. NATO, laser).

Word origins

English, besides forming new words from existing words and their roots, also borrows words from other languages. This process of adding words from other languages is commonplace in many world languages, but English is characterised as being especially open to borrowing of foreign words throughout the last 1,000 years.[203] The most commonly used words in English are West Germanic.[204] The words in English learned first by children as they learn to speak, particularly the grammatical words that dominate the word count of both spoken and written texts, are the Germanic words inherited from the earliest periods of the development of Old English.[198] But one of the consequences of long language contact between French and English in all stages of their development is that the vocabulary of English has a very high percentage of "Latinate" words (derived from French, especially, and also from Latin or from other Romance languages).[205] French words from various periods of the development of French now make up one-third of the vocabulary of English.[206]

English has also borrowed many words directly from Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages, during all stages of its development.[200][198] Many of the words borrowed into English from Latin were earlier borrowed into Latin from Greek. Latin or Greek are still highly productive sources of stems used to form vocabulary of subjects learned in higher education such as the sciences, philosophy, and mathematics.[207] English continues to gain new loanwords and calques ("loan translations") from languages all over the world, and words from languages other than the ancestral Anglo-Saxon language make up about 60 percent of the vocabulary of English.[208] English has formal and informal speech registers, and informal registers, including child directed speech, tend to be made up predominantly of words of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the percentage of vocabulary that is of Latinate origin is higher in legal, scientific, and academic texts.[209][210]

English loanwords and calques in other languages

English has a strong influence on the vocabulary of other languages.[206][211] The influence of English comes from such factors as opinion leaders in other countries knowing the English language, the role of English as a world lingua franca, and the large number of books and films that are translated from English into other languages.[212] That pervasive use of English leads to a conclusion in many places that English is an especially suitable language for expressing new ideas or describing new technologies. Among varieties of English, it is especially American English that influences other languages.[213] Some languages, such as Chinese, write words borrowed from English mostly as calques, while others, such as Japanese, readily take in English loanwords written in sound-indicating script.[214] Dubbed films and television programmes are an especially fruitful source of English influence on languages in Europe.[214]

Writing system


The spelling system, or orthography, of English is multi-layered, with elements of French, Latin, and Greek spelling on top of the native Germanic system.[215] Further complications have arisen through sound changes with which the orthography has not kept pace.[41] Compared to European languages for which official organisations have promoted spelling reforms, English has spelling that is a less consistent indicator of pronunciation and standard spellings of words that are more difficult to guess from knowing how a word is pronounced.[216] There are also systematic spelling differences between British and American English. These situations have prompted proposals for spelling reform in English.[217]

Although letters and speech sounds do not have a one-to-one correspondence in standard English spelling, spelling rules that take into account syllable structure, phonetic changes in derived words, and word accent are reliable for most English words.[218] Moreover, standard English spelling shows etymological relationships between related words that would be obscured by a closer correspondence between pronunciation and spelling, for example the words photograph, photography, and photographic,[218] or the words electricity and electrical. While few scholars agree with Chomsky and Halle (1968) that conventional English orthography is "near-optimal",[215] there is a rationale for current English spelling patterns.[219] The standard orthography of English is the most widely used writing system in the world.[220] Standard English spelling is based on a graphomorphemic segmentation of words into written clues of what meaningful units make up each word.[221]


For the vowel sounds of the English language, however, correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are more irregular. There are many more vowel phonemes in English than there are vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u, w, y). As a result of a smaller set of single letter symbols than the set of vowel phonemes, some "long vowels" are often indicated by combinations of letters (like the oa in boat, the ow in how, and the ay in stay), or the historically based silent e (as in note and cake).[219]

The consequence of this complex orthographic history is that learning to read can be challenging in English. It can take longer for school pupils to become independently fluent readers of English than of many other languages, including Italian, Spanish, or German.[223] Nonetheless, there is an advantage for learners of English reading in learning the specific sound-symbol regularities that occur in the standard English spellings of commonly used words.[218] Such instruction greatly reduces the risk of children experiencing reading difficulties in English.[224][225] Making primary school teachers more aware of the primacy of morpheme representation in English may help learners learn more efficiently to read and write English.[226]

English writing also includes a system of punctuation that is similar to the system of punctuation marks used in most alphabetic languages around the world. The purpose of punctuation is to mark meaningful grammatical relationships in sentences to aid readers in understanding a text and to indicate features important for reading a text aloud.[227]

Dialects, accents, and varieties

Dialectologists distinguish between English dialects, regional varieties that differ from each other in terms of grammar and vocabulary, and regional accents, distinguished by different patterns of pronunciation. The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into the two general categories of the British dialects (BrE) and those of North America (AmE).[228]

UK and Ireland

Map showing the main dialect regions in the UK and Ireland

As the place where English first evolved, the British Isles, and particularly England, are home to the most variegated pattern of dialects. Within the United Kingdom, the Received Pronunciation (RP), an educated dialect of South East England, is traditionally used as the broadcast standard, and is considered the most prestigious of the British dialects. The spread of RP (also known as BBC English) through the media has caused many traditional dialects of rural England to recede, as youths adopt the traits of the prestige variety instead of traits from local dialects. At the time of the Survey of English Dialects, grammar and vocabulary differed across the country, but a process of lexical attrition has led most of this variation to disappear.[229] Nonetheless this attrition has mostly affected dialectal variation in grammar and vocabulary, and in fact only 3 percent of the English population actually speak RP, the remainder speaking regional accents and dialects with varying degrees of RP influence.[230] There is also variability within RP, particularly along class lines between Upper and Middle class RP speakers and between native RP speakers and speakers who adopt RP later in life.[231] Within Britain there is also considerable variation along lines of social class, and some traits though exceedingly common are considered "non-standard" and are associated with lower class speakers and identities. An example of this is H-dropping, which was historically a feature of lower class London English, particularly Cockney, but which today is the standard in all major English cities—yet it remains largely absent in broadcasting and among the upper crust of British society.[232]


Since the 15th century, Southeastern varieties centred around London, which has been the centre from which dialectal innovations have spread to other dialects. In London, the Cockney dialect was traditionally used by the lower classes, and it was long a socially stigmatised variety. Today a large area of Southeastern England has adopted traits from Cockney, resulting in the so-called Estuary English which spread in areas south and East of London beginning in the 1980s. Estuary English is distinguished by traits such as the use of intrusive R (drawing is pronounced drawring /ˈdrɔːrɪŋ/), t-glottalisation (Potter is pronounced with a glottal stop as Po'er /poʔʌ/), and the pronunciation of th- as /f/ (thanks pronounced fanks) or /v/ (bother pronounced bover). [234]

Scots is today considered a separate language from English, but it has its origins in early Northern Middle English[235] and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, particularly Scots Gaelic and Old Norse. Scots itself has a number of regional dialects. And in addition to Scots, Scottish English are the varieties of Standard English spoken in Scotland, most varieties are Northern English accents, with some influence from Scots.[236]

In Ireland, various forms of English have been spoken since the Norman invasions of the 11th century. In County Wexford, in the area surrounding Dublin, two highly conservative dialects known as Forth and Bargy and Fingallian developed as offshoots from Early Middle English, and were spoken until the 19th century. Modern Hiberno-English however has its roots in English colonisation in the 17th century. Today Irish English is divided into Ulster English, a dialect with strong influence from Scots, and southern Hiberno-English. Like Scots and Northern English, the Irish accents preserve the rhoticity which has been lost in most dialects influenced by RP.[16][237]

North America


American English is generally considered fairly homogeneous compared to the British varieties. Today, American accent variation is in fact increasing,[238] though most Americans still speak within a phonological continuum of similar accents,[239] known collectively as General American (GA), with its differing accents hardly noticed even among Americans themselves (such as Midland and Western American English).[240][241][242] Separate from GA are American accents with clearly distinct sound systems; this historically includes Southern American English, English of the coastal Northeast (famously including Eastern New England English and New York City English), and African American Vernacular English. Canadian English, except for the Maritime provinces, may be classified under GA as well, but it often shows unique vowel raising, as well as distinct norms for written and pronunciation standards.[243] In GA and Canadian English, rhoticity (or r-fulness) is dominant, with non-rhoticity (r-dropping) becoming associated with lower prestige and social class especially after World War II; this contrasts with the situation in England, where non-rhoticity has become the standard.[244]

In Southern American English, the largest American "accent group" outside of GA,[245] rhoticity now strongly prevails, replacing the region's historical non-rhotic prestige,[246] though social variation may still apply.[247][248] Southern accents are colloquially described as a "drawl" or "twang,"[249] being recognised most readily by the Southern Vowel Shift that begins with glide-deleting in the /aɪ/ vowel (e.g. pronouncing spy almost like spa), the "Southern breaking" of several front pure vowels into a gliding vowel or even two syllables (e.g. pronouncing the word "press" almost like "pray-us"),[250] the pin–pen merger, and other distinctive phonologial, grammatical, and lexical features, many of which are actually recent developments of the 19th century or later.[251]

Today spoken primarily by working- and middle-class African Americans, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is also largely non-rhotic and likely originated among enslaved Africans and African Americans influenced primarily by the non-rhotic, non-standard English spoken by whites in the Old South. A minority of linguists,[252] contrarily, propose that AAVE mostly traces back to African languages spoken by the slaves who had to develop a pidgin or Creole English to communicate with slaves of other ethnic and linguistic origins.[253] AAVE shares important commonalities with older Southern American English and so probably developed to a highly coherent and homogeneous variety in the 19th or early 20th century. AAVE is commonly stigmatised in North America as a form of "broken" or "uneducated" English, also common of modern Southern American English, but linguists today recognise both as fully developed varieties of English with their own norms shared by a large speech community.[254][255]

Australia and New Zealand

Since 1788 English has been spoken in Oceania, and the major native dialect of Australian English is spoken as a first language by the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Australian continent, with General Australian serving as the standard accent. The English of neighbouring New Zealand has to a lesser degree become an influential standard variety of the language.[256] Australian and New Zealand English are most closely related to British English, and both have similarly non-rhotic accents, aside from some accents in the South Island of New Zealand. They stand out, however, for their innovative vowels: many short vowels are fronted or raised, whereas many long vowels have diphthongised. Australian English also has a contrast between long and short vowels, not found in most other varieties. Australian English grammar differs from British English only in few instances, one difference is the lack of verbal concord with collective plural subjects.[257][258] New Zealand English differs little from Australian English, but a few characteristics sets its accent apart, such as the use of [ʍ] for wh- and its front vowels being even closer than in Australian English.[259][260][261]

Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia

English is spoken widely in South Africa and is an official or co-official language in several countries. In South Africa, English has been spoken since 1820, co-existing with Afrikaans and various African languages such as the Khoe and Bantu languages. Today about 9 percent of the South African population speak South African English (SAE) as a first language. SAE is a non-rhotic variety, which tends to follow RP as a norm. It is alone among non-rhotic varieties in lacking intrusive r. There are different L2 varieties that differ based on the native language of the speakers.[262] Most phonological differences from RP are in the vowels.[263] Consonant differences include the tendency to pronounce /p, t, t͡ʃ, k/ without aspiration (e.g. /pin/ pronounced [pɪn] rather than as [pʰɪn] as in most other varieties), while r is often pronounced as a flap [ɾ] instead of as the more common fricative.[264]


Most Caribbean varieties are based on British English and consequently most are non-rhotic, except for formal styles of Jamaican English which are often rhotic. Jamaican English differs from RP in its vowel inventory, which has a distinction between long and short vowels rather than tense and lax vowels as in Standard English. The diphthongs /ei/ and /ou/ are monophthongs [eː] and [oː] or even the reverse diphthongs [ie] and [uo] (e.g. bay and boat pronounced [bʲeː] and [bʷoːt]). Often word final consonant clusters are simplified so that "child" is pronounced [t͡ʃail] and "wind" [win].[267][268][269]



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  262. ^ Lanham 1982.
  263. ^ Lass 2002.
  264. ^ Trudgill & Hannah 2002, pp. 30–31.
  265. ^ Lawton 1982.
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  267. ^ Trudgill & Hannah 2002, pp. 117–18.
  268. ^ Lawton 1982, p. 256–60.
  269. ^ Trudgill & Hannah 2002, pp. 115–16.
  270. ^ Sailaja 2009, pp. 19–24.


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