The Battle of Grand Gulf was fought on April 29, 1863, during th: Modern English has spread around the world since the 17th century as a consequence of the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States. Through all types of printed and electronic media in these countries, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and professional contexts such as science, navigation, and law.[4] Its modern 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 and a fairly fixed subject–verb–object word order.[29] Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspects and moods, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives, and some negation.