English as a global language.

Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "world language", the lingua franca of the modern era. While English is not an official language in most countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language around the world. Some linguists (such as David Graddol) believe that it is no longer the exclusive cultural property of "native English speakers", but is rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it continues to grow.  It is, by international treaty, the official language for aerial and maritime communications. English is an official language of the United Nations and many other international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee.

English is the language most often studied as a foreign language in the European Union (by 89% of schoolchildren), followed by French (32%), German (18%), Spanish (8%), and Russian; while the perception of the usefulness of foreign languages amongst Europeans is 68% English, 25% French, 22% German, and 16% Spanish. Among non-English speaking EU countries, a large percentage of the population claimed to have been able to converse in English (note that the percentages are for the adult population, aged 15 and above): in Sweden (85%), Denmark (83%), the Netherlands (79%), Luxembourg (66%), Finland (60%), Slovenia (56%), Austria (53%), Belgium (52%), and Germany (51%).

Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around the world. English is also the most commonly used language in the sciences. In 1997, the Science Citation Index reported that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries. 
 

Dialects and regional varieties.

The expansion of the British Empire and—since World War II—the influence of the United States have spread English throughout the globe. Because of that global spread, English has developed a host of English dialects and English-based creole languages and pidgins.

Two educated native dialects of English have wide acceptance as standards in much of the world—one based on educated southern British and the other based on educated Midwestern American. The former is sometimes called BBC (or the Queen's) English, and it may be noticeable by its preference for "Received Pronunciation"; it typifies the Cambridge model, which is the standard for the teaching of English to speakers of other languages in Europe, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and other areas influenced either by the British Commonwealth or by a desire not to be identified with the United States.

The latter dialect, General American, which is spread over most of the United States and much of Canada, is more typically the model for the American continents and areas (such as the Philippines) which have had either close association with the United States or desire to be so identified. Aside from those two major dialects are numerous other varieties of English, which include, in most cases, several subvarieties, such as Cockney, Scouse and Geordie within British English; Newfoundland English within Canadian English; and African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics") and Southern American English within American English. English is a pluricentric language, without a central language authority like France's Académie française; and therefore no one variety is considered "correct" or "incorrect" except in terms of the expectations of the particular audience to which the language is directed.

Scots has its origins in early Northern Middle English and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, but following the Acts of Union 1707 a process of language attrition began, whereby successive generations adopted more and more features from Standard English, causing dialectalisation. Whether it is now a separate language or a dialect of English better described as Scottish English is in dispute, although the UK government now accepts Scots as a regional language and has ecognized it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. There are a number of regional dialects of Scots, and pronunciation, grammar and lexis of the traditional forms differ, sometimes substantially, from other varieties of English.

English speakers have many different accents, which often signal the speaker’s native dialect or language. For the more distinctive characteristics of regional accents, see Regional accents of English, and for the more distinctive characteristics of regional dialects, see List of dialects of the English language. Within England, variation is now largely confined to pronunciation rather than grammar or vocabulary. 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 die out.

Just as English itself has borrowed words from many different languages over its history, English loanwords now appear in many languages around the world, indicative of the technological and cultural influence of its speakers. Several pidgins and creole languages have been formed on an English base, such as Jamaican Patois, Nigerian Pidgin, and Tok Pisin. There are many words in English coined to describe forms of particular non-English languages that contain a very high proportion of English words.

Constructed varieties of English.

• Basic English is simplified for easy international use. Manufacturers and other international businesses tend to write manuals and communicate in Basic English. Some English schools in Asia teach it as a practical subset of English for use by beginners.
• E-Prime excludes forms of the verb to be.
• English reform is an attempt to improve collectively upon the English language.
• Manually Coded English – a variety of systems have been developed to represent the English language with hand signals, designed primarily for use in deaf education. These should not be confused with true sign languages such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language used in Anglophone countries, which are independent and not based on English.
• Seaspeak and the related Airspeak and Policespeak, all based on restricted vocabularies, were designed by Edward Johnson in the 1980s to aid international cooperation and communication in specific areas. There is also a tunnelspeak for use in the Channel Tunnel.
• Special English is a simplified version of English used by the Voice of America. It uses a vocabulary of only 1500 words.

English - A Historical Summary.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

English - A Family Tree. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Grammar.

The history of English grammars begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar. In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar were contrasted with those of Latin. A more modern approach, incorporating phonology, was introduced in the nineteenth century.

Sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

The first English grammar, Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar, written with the seeming goal of demonstrating that English was quite as rule-bound as Latin, was published in 1586. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534). Lily's grammar was being used in schools in England at that time, having been "prescribed" for them in 1542 by Henry VIII. Although Bullokar wrote his grammar in English and used a "reformed spelling system" of his own invention, many English grammars, for much of the century after Bullokar's effort, were to be written in Latin; this was especially so for books whose authors were aiming to be scholarly. Christopher Cooper's Grammatica Linguæ Anglicanæ (1685) was the last English grammar written in Latin.

The yoke of Latin grammar writing bore down oppressively on much of the early history of English grammars. Any attempt by one author to assert an independent grammatical rule for English was quickly followed by equal avowals by others of truth of the corresponding Latin-based equivalent. Even as late as the early 19th century, Lindley Murray, the author of one of the most widely used grammars of the day, was having to cite "grammatical authorities" to bolster the claim that grammatical cases in English are different from those in Ancient Greek or Latin.

The focus on tradition, however, belied the role that other social forces had already begun to play in the early seventeenth century. In particular, increasing commerce, and the social changes it wrought, created new impetus for grammar writing. On the one hand, greater British role in international trade created demand for English grammars for speakers of other languages. Many such grammars were published in various European languages in the second half of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, English grammars began to reach a wider audience within Britain itself. They spread beyond their erstwhile readership of "learned," privileged, adult males to other groups of native speakers such as women, merchants, tradesmen, and even schoolboys. Consequently, by the early eighteenth century, many grammars, such as John Brightland's A Grammar of the English tongue (1711) and James Greenwood's Essay towards a practical English grammar, were targeting people without "Latin background," including the "fair sex" and children.

If by the end of the seventeenth century English grammar writing had made a modest start, totaling 16 new grammars since Bullokar's Pamphlet of 115 years before, by the end of the eighteenth, the pace was positively brisk; 270 new titles were added during that century. Both publishing and demand, moreover, would continue to mushroom. The first half of the nineteenth century would see the appearance of almost 900 new books on English grammar. Showing little originality, most new books took the tack of claiming—as justification for their appearance—that the needs of their particular target audience were still unmet or that a particular "grammatical point" had not been treated adequately in the preexisting texts, or oftentimes both. Texts that were both utilitarian and egalitarian were proliferating everywhere. Edward Shelley's The people's grammar; or English grammar without difficulties for 'the million' (1848), for example, was written for "the mechanic and hard-working youth, in their solitary struggles for the acquirement of knowledge." Similarly, William Cobbett's popular mid-century book was titled, A Grammar of the English Language, In a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General, but more especially for the use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys.

Eighteenth century prescriptive grammars.

Robert Lowth, Bishop of Oxford and thereafter of London, scholar of Hebrew poetry, and for a short time professor of poetry at Oxford, was the first and the best known of the widely emulated grammarians of the 18^th century. A self-effacing clergyman, he published his only work on English grammar, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, with critical notes, in 1762, without the author’s name on the title page. His influence—extended through the works of his students Lindley Murray and William Cobbett—would last well into the late 19^th century. He would also become, among prescriptive grammarians, the target of choice for the criticism meted out by later descriptivist linguists.

Lowth’s chief aim, shared with that of most eighteenth century grammarians, was to present a standard English grammar that taught its readers to express themselves with “propriety” and to accurately evaluate constructions for correctness. Written in a spry and unpretentious style, the book contained a large number of worked examples, whose popularity, especially among the self-taught, made it a big commercial success. Lowth employed footnotes in a new way. He used them not merely to expand on the finer points, but also to offer a critique of errors. Consequently, the book offered a two-tier discourse: elementary statements of rules in the main text, and more nuanced analyses of errors in the footnotes. However, since the samples chosen for the error analysis included those from authors such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Addison, readers were sometimes discouraged by the immensity of the task before them.

Nineteenth century to present.

It was during the nineteenth century that modern-language studies became systematized. In the case of English, this happened first in continental Europe, where it was studied by historical and comparative linguists. In 1832, Danish philologist, Rasmus Rask, published an English grammar, Engelsk Formlære, part of his extensive comparative studies in the grammars of Indo-European languages. German philologist, Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm, included English grammar in his monumental grammar of Germanic languages, Deutsche Grammatik (1822–1837). German historical linguist Eduard Adolf Maetzner published his 1,700 page Englische Grammatik between 1860 and 1865; an English translation, An English grammar: methodical, analytical and historical appeared in 1874. Contributing little new to the intrinsic scientific study of English grammar, these works nonetheless showed that English was being studied seriously by the first professional linguists.

As phonology became a full-fledged field, spoken English began to be studied scientifically as well, generating by the end of the nineteenth century an international enterprise investigating the structure of the language. This enterprise comprised scholars at various universities, their students who were training to be teachers of English, and journals publishing new research. All the pieces were in place for new "large-scale English grammars" which combined the disparate approaches of the previous decades. The first work to lay claim to the new scholarship was British linguist Henry Sweet's A new English grammar: logical and historical, published in two parts, Phonology and Accidence (1892) and Syntax (1896), its title suggesting not only continuity and contrast with Maetzner's earlier work, but also kinship with the contemporary A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (begun 1884), later the Oxford English Dictionary (1895). Two other contemporary English grammars were also influential. English Grammar: Past and Present, by John Collinson Nesfield, was originally written for the market in colonial India. It was later expanded to appeal to students in Britain as well, from young men preparing for various professional examinations to students in "Ladies' Colleges." Grammar of spoken English (1924), by H. E. Palmer, written for the teaching and study of English as a foreign language, included a full description of the intonation patterns of English.