English cucumber

On this Wikipedia the language links are at english cucumber top of the page across from the article title. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. English is a language that started in Anglo-Saxon England. It is originally from Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon dialects.

English is now used as a global language. Frisian is the language closest to English. The vocabulary of English was influenced by other Germanic languages in the early Middle Ages and later by Romance languages, especially French. English is the only official language or one of the official languages of nearly 60 countries. It is also the main language of more countries in the world than any other. In 2005, it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English.

English is the first foreign language for most learners who have another main language. English has changed and developed over time, like all other languages. The most obvious changes are the many words taken from Latin and Old French, which then came to Old English and then Modern English, which is used today. English grammar has also become very different from other Germanic languages, but it stayed different from Romance languages. Latin, English is sometimes called the Germanic language that is the most Latin, and it is often mistaken for being a Romance language. The Germanic dialects of the different tribes became what is now called Old English.

The word “English” comes from the name of the Angles: Englas. Old English did not sound or look much like the English spoken today. If English speakers today were to hear or read a passage in Old English, they would understand just a few words. The closest language to English that is still used today is Frisian, spoken by about 500,000 people living in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. It is much like English, and many words are the same. Many other people came to England later at different times, speaking different languages, and these languages added more words to make today’s English. When William the Conqueror took over England in 1066 AD, he brought his nobles, who spoke Norman, a language closely related to French.

English changed a lot because it was mostly being spoken instead of written for about 300 years. English grammar has also changed, becoming simpler and less Germanic. The classic example is the loss of case in grammar. Grammatical case shows the role of a noun, adjective or pronoun in a sentence.