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Over the past century the English language has become the international language of business, with almost two billion people speaking English. In fact, the only language spoken by more people is Mandarin Chinese, though this language has until recently been largely confined to China and its immediate neighbors. Of the two billion English speakers, around 450 million speak English as their first language. That means that more than 1.5 billion speak English as a second, third, or even fourth language, making English the most widely-spoken second language in the world. As a result, there has never been a greater demand for English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction.
But English is a notoriously difficult language to learn. Unlike Spanish, English spelling does not follow pronunciation. Unlike German, English grammar does not follow clear cases and constructions. However, it is English’s flexibility and adaptability that has allowed it to grow into the world’s first truly global language.
The English language was born when an early dialect of German related to modern Frisian took root in what is now England. As it grew and changed, it had become by the ninth century a language known as Old English, the first recorded version of what would become modern English. This Old English began to incorporate new words from groups who invaded England over the next several centuries. From the Vikings (known then as “Danes”), English absorbed Old Norse words like “they,” “their,” and “them.” From the French (known as Norman) invaders, English swallowed whole a vast number of Latin and Old French words, like “pork,” “surrender,” and “family.” In fact, the Norman invasion of 1066 did more to change the English language than any other single event, for the English people spent centuries living under a French-speaking Norman ruling class whose language trickled down to them. This is why the words for farm animals (cow, sheep) are Old English but the words for their meat, which was served to the Norman lords, derives from French (beef, mutton) [1]. The English spoke to the Normans in their own language about things the Normans controlled (such as eating the meat) but returned to their native tongue for their own concerns (tending the animals).
After the Normans, we enter the period of Middle English, during which Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, large portions of which are still readable today with only a few footnotes about obsolete words. About 25 percent of Chaucer’s words derived from French or Latin, a proportion that only rose as English took on ever more Latin-derived words during the Renaissance. Scholars looking for new terminology and better ways of describing the world turned to Latin to increase their vocabulary, and these words also found their way into English (words like industrial, exaggerate, and superiority, for example). Many of these new Latin-inspired words found their way into English’s most famous writer, William Shakespeare. And by the time we reach Shakespeare we find ourselves deposited in the world of Modern English, the language that the British Empire and the United States spread across the world.
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[1] Melvin Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (New York: Arcade, 2003), 49.
