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English is a that was first spoken in and is now a global. Named after the, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to, it ultimately derives its name from the peninsula in the. It is closely related to the, but its vocabulary has been significantly influenced by other, particularly (a ), as well as by and, especially. English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of brought to by in the 5th century, are called.

Began in the late 11th century with the, and was a period in which the language was influenced by French. Began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the to London and the, and the start of the. Through the worldwide influence of the, 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, English has become the of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and in professional contexts such as science, navigation and law.

English is the in the world, after and. It is the most widely learned and is either the or one of the official languages in. There are more people who have learned it as a second language than there are native speakers. English is the most commonly spoken language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, and it is widely spoken in some areas of the, Africa and South Asia.

It is, of 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 a vast, and counting exactly how many words it has is impossible. Modern is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent marking pattern with a rich and relatively free, to a mostly pattern with little, a fairly fixed and a complex.

Relies more on and for the expression of complex, and, as well as, and some. Despite noticeable variation among the and used in different countries and regions – in terms of and, and sometimes also, and – English-speakers from around the world are able to communicate with one another with. Englischmen þeyz hy hadde fram þe bygynnyng þre manner speche, Souþeron, Northeron, and Myddel speche in þe myddel of þe lond, Noþeles by comyxstion and mellyng, furst wiþ Danes, and afterward wiþ Normans, in menye þe contray longage ys asperyed, and som vseþ strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbytting. Although, from the beginning, Englishmen had three manners of speaking, southern, northern and midlands speech in the middle of the country, Nevertheless, through intermingling and mixing, first with Danes and then with Normans, amongst many the country language has arisen, and some use strange stammering, chattering, snarling, and grating gnashing. 1385 In the period from the 8th to the 12th century, Old English gradually transformed through into. Middle English is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the by in 1066, but it developed further in the period from 1200–1450. First, the waves of Norse colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English into intense contact with, a language.

Preston's research on Americans' perceptions of United States English dialect areas has enabled him to present both. Potential significantly to extend and deepen Trudgill's notion of 'salience' (Trudgill. Recognition of and attitudes to regional accents of Welsh English as spoken by teenagers of the same age as.

Norse influence was strongest in the Northeastern varieties of Old English spoken in the area around York, which was the centre of Norse colonisation; today these features are still particularly present in and. However the centre of norsified English seems to have been in around, and after 920 CE when Lindsey was reincorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity, Norse features spread from there into English varieties that had not been in intense contact with Norse speakers. Some elements of Norse influence that persist in all English varieties today are the pronouns beginning with th- ( they, them, their) which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with h- ( hie, him, hera). With the in 1066, the now norsified Old English language was subject to contact with the language, a closely related to Modern. The Norman language in England eventually developed into. 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 related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains.

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. The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms, and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible. By the of the 1380s, the passage Matthew 8:20 was written Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heuene han nestis Here the plural suffix -n on the verb have is still retained, but none of the case endings on the nouns are present.

By the 12th century Middle English was fully developed, integrating both Norse and Norman features; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early Modern English around 1500. Middle English literature includes 's, and. In the Middle English period the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer. Early Modern English.

Graphic representation of the, showing how the pronunciation of the long vowels gradually shifted, with the high vowels i: and u: breaking into diphthongs and the lower vowels each shifting their pronunciation up one level The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English (1500–1700). Early Modern English was characterised by the (1350–1700), inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation. The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English.

It was a, meaning that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. And were, and were into. For example, the word bite was originally pronounced as the word beet is today, and the second vowel in the word about was pronounced as the word boot is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling, since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages. English began to rise in prestige during the reign of.

Around 1430, the in began using English in its, and a new standard form of Middle English, known as, developed from the dialects of London and the. In 1476, introduced the to England and began publishing the first printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English.

Literature from the Early Modern period includes the works of and the commissioned. Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the /kn ɡn 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. In the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, written in Early Modern English, Matthew 8:20 says: The Foxes haue holes and the birds of the ayre haue nests This exemplifies the loss of case and its effects on sentence structure (replacement with Subject-Verb-Object word order, and the use of of instead of the non-possessive genitive), and the introduction of loanwords from French ( ayre) and word replacements ( bird originally meaning 'nestling' had replaced OE fugol).

Spread of Modern English By the late 18th century, the 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.

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 opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. In the 20th century the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the and other broadcasters, significantly accelerated the spread of the language across the planet. By the 21st century, English was more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.

A major feature in the early development of Modern English was the codification of explicit norms for standard usage, and their dissemination through official media such as public education and state sponsored publications. In 1755 published his which introduced a standard set of spelling conventions and usage norms.

In 1828, published the in an effort to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent from the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes. In terms of grammatical evolution, Modern English has now reached a stage where the loss of case is almost complete (case is now only found in pronouns, such as he and him, she and her, who and whom), and where SVO word-order is mostly fixed.

Some changes, such as the use of have become universalised. (Earlier English did not use the word 'do' as a general auxiliary as Modern English does; at first it was only used in question constructions where it was not obligatory. Now, do-support with the verb have is becoming increasingly standardised.) The use of progressive forms in -ing, appears to be spreading to new constructions, and forms such as had been being built are becoming more common.

Regularisation of irregular forms also slowly continues (e.g. Dreamed instead of dreamt), and analytical alternatives to inflectional forms are becoming more common (e.g.

More polite instead of politer). British English is also undergoing change under the influence of American English, fuelled by the strong presence of American English in the media and the prestige associated with the US as a world power. Geographical distribution. Not available As of 2016, 400 million people spoke English as their, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after and.

However, when combining native and non-native speakers it may, depending on the estimate used, be the most commonly spoken language in the world. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on oceanic islands in all the major oceans. The countries in which English is spoken can be grouped into different categories by how English is used in each country. The 'inner circle' 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 distinguishes countries where English is spoken with a. In his model, the 'inner circle' countries are countries with large communities of native speakers of English, 'outer circle' countries have small communities of native speakers of English but widespread use of English as a second language in education or broadcasting or for local official purposes, and 'expanding circle' countries are countries where many learners learn English as a foreign language. Kachru bases his model on the history of how English spread in different countries, how users acquire English, and the range of uses English has in each country. The three circles change membership over time. Braj Kachru's Three Circles of English.

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 (at least 231 million), the (60 million), Canada (19 million), (at least 17 million), South Africa (4.8 million), (4.2 million), and New Zealand (3.7 million). 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. The inner-circle countries provide the base from which English spreads to other countries in the world. Estimates of the number of English speakers who are and foreign-language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1,000 million depending on how proficiency is defined. Linguist estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.

In Kachru's three-circles model, the 'outer circle' countries are countries such as the,, India, Pakistan [ ], Singapore, and 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. Those countries have millions of native speakers of ranging from an 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. Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries, 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. 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'.

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. For example, in the 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, 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, its widespread use 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. 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.

Non-native varieties of English are widely used for international communication, and speakers of one such variety often encounter features of other varieties. 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. Other (5.6%) Pluricentric English English is a, which means that no one national authority sets the standard for use of the language. But English is not a divided language, despite a long-standing joke originally attributed to that the United Kingdom and the United States are 'two countries separated by a common language'. 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, but newsreader scripts are also composed largely in international. 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.

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. 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. The settlement history of the English-speaking inner circle countries outside Britain helped level dialect distinctions and produce forms of English in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

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, although English has been given official status by only 30 of the 50 state governments of the US.

English as a global language. See also: and English has ceased to be an 'English language' in the sense of belonging only to people who are ethnically English. Use of English is growing country-by-country internally and for international communication. Most people learn English for practical rather than ideological reasons. Many speakers of English in Africa have become part of an 'Afro-Saxon' language community that unites Africans from different countries.

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. For example, the view of the 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.

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. 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.

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, 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. Modern English, sometimes described as the first global, is also regarded as the first. English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy.

English is, by international treaty, the basis for the required and Airspeak, used as of seafaring and aviation. English used to have parity with French and German in scientific research, but now it dominates that field. It achieved parity with as a language of diplomacy at the negotiations in 1919. By the time of the foundation of the at the end of, English had become pre-eminent and is now the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Many other worldwide international organisations, including the, specify English as a working language or official language of the organisation. Many regional international organisations such as the, (ASEAN), and (APEC) set English as their organisation's sole working language even though most members are not countries with a majority of native English speakers.

While the European Union (EU) allows member states to designate any of the national languages as an official language of the Union, in practice English is the main working language of EU organisations. Although in most countries English is not an official language, it is currently the language most often taught as a. In the countries of the EU, English is the most widely spoken foreign language in nineteen of the twenty-five member states where it is not an official language (that is, the countries other than the UK, Ireland and ). In a 2012 official Eurobarometer poll, 38 percent of the EU respondents outside the countries where English is an official language said they could speak English well enough to have a conversation in that language. The next most commonly mentioned foreign language, French (which is the most widely known foreign language in the UK and Ireland), could be used in conversation by 12 percent of respondents. A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine 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.

Specialised subsets of English arise spontaneously in international communities, for example, among international business people, as an. This has led some scholars to develop the study of English as an auxiliary languages. 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. 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, and to claims of, 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. 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 language in which the standard form unifies speakers from around the world. English is used as the language for wider communication in countries around the world.

Thus English has grown in worldwide use much more than any proposed as an, including. Main article: As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows. Unlike other Indo-European languages though, English has largely abandoned the inflectional in favor of constructions. Only the retain morphological case more strongly than any other. English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners (including 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. 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, (fronting of question words beginning with wh-) and word order with some verbs. Some traits typical of Germanic languages persist in English, such as the distinction between irregularly inflected stems inflected through (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.

The seven word classes are exemplified in this sample sentence: The chairman of the committee and the loquacious politician clashed violently when the meeting started. Noun Verb Advb. Noun Verb Nouns and noun phrases English nouns are only inflected for number and possession. New nouns can be formed through derivation or compounding. They are semantically divided into (names) and common nouns. Common nouns are in turn divided into concrete and abstract nouns, and grammatically into and.

Most count nouns are inflected for plural number through the use of the plural - s, but a few nouns have irregular plural forms. Mass nouns can only be pluralised through the use of a count noun classifier, e.g. One loaf of bread, two loaves of bread. Regular plural formation: Singular: cat, dog Plural: cats, dogs Irregular plural formation: Singular: man, woman, foot, fish, ox, knife, mouse Plural: men, women, feet, fish, oxen, knives, mice Possession can be expressed either by the possessive - s (also traditionally called a genitive suffix), or by the preposition of. Historically the -s possessive has been used for animate nouns, whereas the of possessive has been reserved for inanimate nouns.

Today this distinction is less clear, and many speakers use - s also with inanimates. Orthographically the possessive -s is separated from the noun root with an apostrophe. Possessive constructions: With -s: The woman's husband's child With of: The child of the husband of the woman Nouns can form (NPs) where they are the syntactic head of the words that depend on them such as determiners, quantifiers, conjunctions or adjectives.

Noun phrases can be short, such as the man, composed only of a determiner and a noun. They can also include modifiers such as adjectives (e.g. Red, tall, all) and specifiers such as determiners (e.g.

But they can also tie together several nouns into a single long NP, using conjunctions such as and, or prepositions such as with, e.g. The tall man with the long red trousers and his skinny wife with the spectacles (this NP uses conjunctions, prepositions, specifiers and modifiers). Regardless of length, an NP functions as a syntactic unit. For example, the possessive enclitic can, in cases which do not lead to ambiguity, follow the entire noun phrase, as in The President of India's wife, where the enclitic follows India and not President. The class of determiners is used to specify the noun they precede in terms of, where the marks a definite noun and a or an an indefinite one. A definite noun is assumed by the speaker to be already known by the interlocutor, whereas an indefinite noun is not specified as being previously known.

Quantifiers, which include one, many, some and all, are used to specify the noun in terms of quantity or number. The noun must agree with the number of the determiner, e.g. One man (sg.) but all men (pl.). Determiners are the first constituents in a noun phrase.

Adjectives Adjectives modify a noun by providing additional information about their referents. In English, adjectives come before the nouns they modify and after determiners. In Modern English, adjectives are not inflected, and they do not in form with the noun they modify, as adjectives in most other Indo-European languages do. For example, in the phrases the slender boy, and many slender girls, the adjective slender does not change form to agree with either the number or gender of the noun.

Some adjectives are inflected for, with the positive degree unmarked, the suffix -er marking the comparative, and -est marking the superlative: a small boy, the boy is smaller than the girl, that boy is the smallest. Some adjectives have irregular comparative and superlative forms, such as good, better, and best. Other adjectives have comparatives formed by, with the adverb more marking the comparative, and most marking the superlative: happier or more happy, the happiest or most happy. There is some variation among speakers regarding which adjectives use inflected or periphrastic comparison, and some studies have shown a tendency for the periphrastic forms to become more common at the expense of the inflected form. 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 corresponds to the Old English, and the is used both in the sense of the previous (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 of a transitive verb). Subjective case is used when the pronoun is the subject of a finite clause, and otherwise the objective case is used. While grammarians such as and noted that the English cases did not correspond to the traditional Latin based system, some contemporary grammars, for example, 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). The English system of grammatical person no longer has a distinction between formal and informal pronouns of address (the old 2nd person singular familiar pronoun acquired a pejorative or inferior tinge of meaning and was abandoned), 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 and or youse and ye found in Irish English.

English personal pronouns Person Subjective case Objective case Dependent possessive Independent possessive Reflexive 1st p. I me my mine myself 2nd p. You you your yours yourself 3rd p. He/she/it him/her/it his/her/its his/hers/its himself/herself/itself 1st p.

We us our ours ourselves 2nd p. You you your yours yourselves 3rd p.

Pl they them their theirs themselves Pronouns are used to refer to entities. A deictic pronoun points to some person or object by identifying it relative to the speech situation — for example the pronoun I identifies the speaker, and the pronoun you, the addressee. Anaphorical pronouns such as that refer back to an entity already mentioned or assumed by the speaker to be known by the audience, for example in the sentence I already told you that. The reflexive pronouns are used when the oblique argument is identical to the subject of a phrase (e.g.

'he sent it to himself' or 'she braced herself for impact'). Prepositions Prepositional phrases (PP) are phrases composed of a preposition and one or more nouns, e.g. With the dog, for my friend, to school, in England.

Prepositions have a wide range of uses in English. They are used to describe movement, place, and other relations between different entities, but they also have many syntactic uses such as introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs.

For example, in the phrase I gave it to him, the preposition to marks the recipient, or Indirect Object of the verb to give. Traditionally words were only considered prepositions if they governed the case of the noun they preceded, for example causing the pronouns to use the objective rather than subjective form, 'with her', 'to me', 'for us'. But some contemporary grammars such as that of:598–600) no longer consider government of case to be the defining feature of the class of prepositions, rather defining prepositions as words that can function as the heads of prepositional phrases. 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. Auxiliary verbs such as have and be are paired with verbs in the infinitive, past, or progressive forms. They form 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. Most verbs have six inflectional forms. The primary forms are a plain present, a third person singular present, and a preterite (past) form. The secondary forms are a plain form used for the infinitive, a gerund–participle and a past participle. The copula verb to be is the only verb to retain some of its original conjugation, and takes different inflectional forms depending on the subject. The first person present tense form is am, the third person singular form is and the form are is used second person singular and all three plurals.

The only verb past participle is been and its gerund-participle is being. English inflectional forms Inflection Strong Regular Plain present take love 3rd person sg. Present takes loves Preterite took loved Plain (infinitive) take love Gerund–participle taking loving Past participle taken loved Tense, aspect and mood English has two primary tenses, past (preterit) and non-past. The preterit is inflected by using the preterit form of the verb, which for the regular verbs includes the suffix -ed, and for the strong verbs either the suffix -t or a change in the stem vowel. The non-past form is unmarked except in the third person singular, which takes the suffix -s.

Present Preterite First person I run I ran Second person You run You ran Third person John runs John ran English does not have a morphologised future tense. Futurity of action is expressed periphrastically with one of the auxiliary verbs will or shall. Many varieties also use a near future constructed with the phrasal verb be going to. Future First person I will run Second person You will run Third person John will run Further aspectual distinctions are encoded by the use of auxiliary verbs, primarily have and be, which encode the contrast between a perfect and non-perfect past tense ( I have run vs. I was running), and compound tenses such as preterite perfect ( I had been running) and present perfect ( I have been running). For the expression of mood, English uses a number of modal auxiliaries, such as can, may, will, shall and the past tense forms could, might, would, should. There is also a subjunctive and an imperative mood, both based on the plain form of the verb (i.e.

Without the third person singular -s), and which is used in subordinate clauses (e.g. Subjunctive: It is important that he run every day; imperative Run!). An infinitive form, that uses the plain form of the verb and the preposition to, is used for verbal clauses that are syntactically subordinate to a finite verbal clause. Finite verbal clauses are those that are formed around a verb in the present or preterit form.

In clauses with auxiliary verbs they are the finite verbs and the main verb is treated as a subordinate clause. For example, he has to go where only the auxiliary verb have is inflected for time and the main verb to go is in the infinitive, or in a complement clause such as I saw him leave, where the main verb is to see which is in a preterite form, and leave is in the infinitive. Phrasal verbs English also makes frequent use of constructions traditionally called, verb phrases that are made up of a verb root and a preposition or particle which follows the verb. The phrase then functions as a single predicate. In terms of intonation the preposition is fused to the verb, but in writing it is written as a separate word. Examples of phrasal verbs are to get up, to ask out, to back up, to give up, to get together, to hang out, to put up with, etc.

The phrasal verb frequently has a highly meaning that is more specialised and restricted than what can be simply extrapolated from the combination of verb and preposition complement (e.g. Lay off meaning terminate someone's employment). In spite of the idiomatic meaning, some grammarians, including:274, do not consider this type of construction to form a syntactic constituent and hence refrain from using the term 'phrasal verb'. Instead they consider the construction simply to be a verb with a prepositional phrase as its syntactic complement, i.e. He woke up in the morning and he ran up in the mountains are syntactically equivalent.

Adverbs The function of adverbs is to modify the action or event described by the verb by providing additional information about the manner in which it occurs. Many adverbs are derived from adjectives with the suffix -ly, but not all, and many speakers tend to omit the suffix in the most commonly used adverbs. For example, in the phrase the woman walked quickly the adverb quickly derived from the adjective quick describes the woman's way of walking. Some commonly used adjectives have irregular adverbial forms, such as good which has the adverbial form well. In the English sentence The cat sat on the mat, the subject is the cat (a NP), the verb is sat, and on the mat is a prepositional phrase (composed of an NP the mat, and headed by the preposition on).

The tree describes the structure of the sentence. Modern English syntax language is moderately. It has developed features such as and as resources for conveying meaning. Mark constructions such as questions, negative polarity, the and progressive. Basic constituent order English word order has moved from the Germanic to being almost exclusively (SVO).

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. 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 S V O The man bites the dog S V O An exception is found in sentences where one of the constituents is a pronoun, in which case it is doubly marked, both by word order and by case inflection, where the subject pronoun precedes the verb and takes the subjective case form, and the object pronoun follows the verb and takes the objective case form. The example below demonstrates this double marking in a sentence where both object and subject is represented with a third person singular masculine pronoun: He hit him S V O (IO) of ditransitive verbs can be placed either as the first object in a double object construction (S V IO O), such as I gave Jane the book or in a prepositional phrase, such as I gave the book to Jane Clause syntax. Main article: 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. 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.) In contrast to many other Germanic languages there is no major differences between word order in main and subordinate clauses.

Auxiliary verb constructions. Main articles: and English syntax relies on auxiliary verbs for many functions including the expression of tense, aspect and mood. Auxiliary verbs form main clauses, and the main verbs function as heads of a subordinate clause of the auxiliary verb.

For example, in the sentence the dog did not find its bone, the clause find its bone is the complement of the negated verb did not. Is used in many constructions, including focus, negation, and interrogative constructions. The verb do can be used as an auxiliary even in simple declarative sentences, where it usually serves to add emphasis, as in 'I did shut the fridge.' However, in the negated and inverted clauses referred to above, it is used because the rules of English permit these constructions only when an auxiliary is present. Does not allow the addition of the negating adverb not to an ordinary lexical verb, as in *I know not—it can only be added to an auxiliary (or ) verb, hence if there is no other auxiliary present when negation is required, the auxiliary do is used, to produce a form like I do not (don't) know.

The same applies in clauses requiring inversion, including most questions—inversion must involve the subject and an auxiliary verb, so it is not possible to say *Know you him?; grammatical rules require Do you know him? Negation is done with the adverb not, which precedes the main verb and follows an auxiliary verb.

A contracted form of not -n't can be used as an enclitic attaching to auxiliary verbs and to the copula verb to be. Just as with questions, many negative constructions require the negation to occur with do-support, thus in Modern English I don't know him is the correct answer to the question Do you know him?, but not *I know him not, although this construction may be found in older English. Passive constructions also use auxiliary verbs. A passive construction rephrases an active construction in such a way that the object of the active phrase becomes the subject of the passive phrase, and the subject of the active phrase is either omitted or demoted to a role as an oblique argument introduced in a prepositional phrase.

They are formed by using the past participle either with the auxiliary verb to be or to get, although not all varieties of English allow the use of passives with get. For example, putting the sentence she sees him into the passive becomes he is seen (by her), or he gets seen (by her). Questions Both and in English are mostly formed using ( Am I going tomorrow?, Where can we eat?), which may require ( Do you like her?, Where did he go?). In most cases, ( wh-words; e.g. What, who, where, when, why, how) appear in a. For example, in the question What did you see?, the word what appears as the first constituent despite being the of the sentence.

(When the wh-word is the subject or forms part of the subject, no inversion occurs: Who saw the cat?) can also be fronted when they are the question's theme, e.g. To whose house did you go last night? The personal interrogative pronoun is the only interrogative pronoun to still show inflection for case, with the variant whom serving as the objective case form, although this form may be going out of use in many contexts. Discourse level syntax While English is a subject-prominent language, at the discourse level it tends to use a structure, where the known information (topic) precedes the new information (comment).

Because of the strict SVO syntax, the topic of a sentence generally has to be the grammatical subject of the sentence. In cases where the topic is not the grammatical subject of the sentence, frequently the topic is promoted to subject position through syntactic means. One way of doing this is through a passive construction, the girl was stung by the bee. Another way is through a where the main clause is demoted to be a complement clause of a copula sentence with a such as it or there, e.g. It was the girl that the bee stung, there was a girl who was stung by a bee. Dummy subjects are also used in constructions where there is no grammatical subject such as with impersonal verbs (e.g., it is raining) or in existential clauses ( there are many cars on the street). Through the use of these complex sentence constructions with informationally vacuous subjects, English is able to maintain both a topic-comment sentence structure and a SVO syntax.

Emphasise a particular piece of new or salient information within a sentence, generally through allocating the main sentence level stress on the focal constituent. For example, the girl was stung by a bee (emphasising it was a bee and not for example a wasp that stung her), or The girl was stung by a bee (contrasting with another possibility, for example that it was the boy). Topic and focus can also be established through syntactic dislocation, either preposing or postposing the item to be focused on relative to the main clause. For example, That girl over there, she was stung by a bee, emphasises the girl by preposition, but a similar effect could be achieved by postposition, she was stung by a bee, that girl over there, where reference to the girl is established as an 'afterthought'.

Between sentences is achieved through the use of deictic pronouns as (e.g. That is exactly what I mean where that refers to some fact known to both interlocutors, or then used to locate the time of a narrated event relative to the time of a previously narrated event).

Such as oh, so or well, also signal the progression of ideas between sentences and help to create cohesion. Discourse markers are often the first constituents in sentences. Discourse markers are also used for in which speakers position themselves in a specific attitude towards what is being said, for example, no way is that true! (the idiomatic marker no way! Expressing disbelief), or boy!

I'm hungry (the marker boy expressing emphasis). While discourse markers are particularly characteristic of informal and spoken registers of English, they are also used in written and formal registers. Vocabulary English is an immensely rich language in terms of vocabulary, containing more than any other language. There are words which appear on the surface to mean exactly the same thing but which, in fact, have a slightly different shade of and must be used appropriately if a speaker wants to convey precisely the message they intend to convey.

It is generally stated that English has around 170,000 words, or 220,000 if are counted; this estimate is based on the last full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1989. Over half of these words are nouns, a quarter adjectives and a seventh verbs. There is one count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words – but that count presumably includes words such as Latin,, and words,, foreign words of extremely limited English use and technical. Due to its status an international language, English is expeditious when it comes adopting foreign words, and borrows vocabulary from a large number of other sources. Early studies of English vocabulary by, 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, 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. 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, 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, producing compound words such as babysitter or ice cream or homesick. 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, 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 ' (ISV) when compiling (1961).

Another active word-formation process in English is acronyms, words formed by pronouncing as a single word abbreviations of longer phrases (e.g. NATO, laser). Word origins.

Source languages of English vocabulary 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. The most commonly used words in English are West Germanic.

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. 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). French words from various periods of the development of French now make up one-third of the vocabulary of English. Words of Old Norse origin have entered the English language primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and.

Many of these words are part of English core vocabulary, such as egg or knife. English has also borrowed many words directly from Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages, during all stages of its development. Many of these words 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. English continues to gain new loanwords and ('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. English has formal and informal, 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.

English loanwords and calques in other languages English has a strong influence on the vocabulary of other languages. 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. 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. Some languages, such as Chinese, write words borrowed from English mostly as, while others, such as Japanese, readily take in English loanwords written in sound-indicating script.

Dubbed films and television programmes are an especially fruitful source of English influence on languages in Europe. Writing system. See also:,, and Since the ninth century, English has been written in a (also called Roman alphabet). Earlier Old English texts in are only short inscriptions. The great majority of literary works in Old English that survive to today are written in the Roman alphabet.

The modern English alphabet contains 26 letters of the:,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, (which also have forms: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z). The spelling system, or, of English is multi-layered, with elements of French, Latin, and Greek spelling on top of the native Germanic system. Further complications have arisen through with which the orthography has not kept pace. 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. There are also systematic. These situations have prompted proposals for spelling reform in English. 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.

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, or the words electricity and electrical. While few scholars agree with Chomsky and Halle (1968) that conventional English orthography is 'near-optimal', there is a rationale for current English spelling patterns. The standard orthography of English is the most widely used writing system in the world.

Standard English spelling is based on a graphomorphemic segmentation of words into written clues of what meaningful units make up each word. Readers of English can generally rely on the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation to be fairly regular for letters or used to spell consonant sounds. The letters b, d, f, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z represent, respectively, the phonemes /b, d, f, h, dʒ, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, j, z/. The letters c and g normally represent /k/ and /ɡ/, but there is also a pronounced /s/, and a pronounced /dʒ/. The differences in the pronunciations of the letters c and g are often signalled by the following letters in standard English spelling. Digraphs used to represent phonemes and phoneme sequences include ch for /tʃ/, sh for /ʃ/, th for /θ/ or /ð/, ng for /ŋ/, qu for /kw/, and ph for /f/ in Greek-derived words. The single letter x is generally pronounced as /z/ in word-initial position and as /ks/ otherwise.

There are exceptions to these generalisations, often the result of loanwords being spelled according to the spelling patterns of their languages of origin or proposals by pedantic scholars in the early period of Modern English to mistakenly follow the spelling patterns of Latin for English words of Germanic origin. 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 ' 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 (as in note and cake). 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. 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. Such instruction greatly reduces the risk of children experiencing reading difficulties in English.

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. English writing also includes a system of 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.

Dialects, accents, and varieties. Main articles:,, and Dialectologists identify many, which usually refer to regional varieties that differ from each other in terms of patterns of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The pronunciation of particular areas distinguishes dialects as separate. The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into the two extremely general categories of (BrE) and (NAE). There also exists a third common major grouping of English varieties: Southern Hemisphere English, the most prominent being and. United Kingdom 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 diverse dialects. Within the United Kingdom, the (RP), an educated dialect of, 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, grammar and vocabulary differed across the country, but a process of lexical attrition has led most of this variation to disappear. 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. 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. 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, which was historically a feature of lower class London English, particularly Cockney, and can now be heard in the local accents of most parts of England — yet it remains largely absent in broadcasting and among the upper crust of British society. An example of an English female with a accent, which is also known as or 'BBC English'.

Problems playing this file? Can be divided into four major dialect regions,, South East English, Midlands English, and.

Within each of these regions several local subdialects exist: Within the Northern region, there is a division between the Yorkshire dialects, and the dialect spoken in Northumbria around Newcastle, and the Lancashire dialects with local urban dialects in () and (). Having been the centre of Danish occupation during the Viking Invasions, Northern English dialects, particularly the Yorkshire dialect, retain Norse features not found in other English varieties. Since the 15th century, southeastern England varieties centred around London, which has been the centre from which dialectal innovations have spread to other dialects. In London, the dialect was traditionally used by the lower classes, and it was long a socially stigmatised variety. The spread of Cockney features across the south-east led the media to talk of Estuary English as a new dialect, but the notion was criticised by many linguists on the grounds that London had influencing neighbouring regions throughout history. Traits that have spread from London in recent decades include the use of ( drawing is pronounced drawring /ˈdrɔːrɪŋ/), ( 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). Is today considered a separate language from English, but it has in early Northern Middle English and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, particularly and Old Norse.

Scots itself has a number of regional dialects. And in addition to Scots, are the varieties of Standard English spoken in Scotland, most varieties are Northern English accents, with some influence from Scots. In, various forms of English have been spoken since the of the 11th century. In, in the area surrounding, two extinct dialects known as and developed as offshoots from Early Middle English, and were spoken until the 19th century. Modern, however has its roots in English colonisation in the 17th century.

Today Irish English is divided into, the Northern Ireland dialect with strong influence from Scots, as well as various dialects of the Republic of Ireland. Like Scottish and most North American accents, almost all Irish accents preserve the rhoticity which has been lost in the dialects influenced by RP. North America. Dominates in. The found over 50% non-rhoticity, though, in at least one local white speaker in each U.S. Metropolitan area designated here by a red dot. Non-rhotic pronunciations may be found among regardless of location.

American English is fairly homogeneous compared to British English. Today, American accent variation is often increasing at the regional level and decreasing at the very local level, though most Americans still speak within a phonological continuum of similar accents, known collectively as (GA), with differences hardly noticed even among Americans themselves (such as and ). In most American and Canadian English, (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. Separate from GA are American dialects with clearly distinct sound systems, historically including, English of the coastal Northeast (famously including and ), and, all of which are historically non-rhotic., except for the and perhaps, may be classified under GA as well, but it often shows, and, before, as well as distinct norms for written and pronunciation standards. In, the largest American 'accent group' outside of GA, rhoticity now strongly prevails, replacing the region's historical non-rhotic prestige. Southern accents are colloquially described as a 'drawl' or 'twang,' being recognised most readily by the Southern Vowel Shift that begins with 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'), the, and other distinctive phonological, grammatical, and lexical features, many of which are actually recent developments of the 19th century or later. Today spoken primarily by working- and middle-class, 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 dialects of the.

A minority of linguists, contrarily, propose that AAVE mostly traces back to African languages spoken by the slaves who had to develop a or to communicate with slaves of other ethnic and linguistic origins. AAVE shares important commonalities with 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.

Australia and New Zealand. An example of an Australian male with a general Australian accent. Problems playing this file?

Since 1788, English has been spoken in, and has developed as a first language of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Australian continent, its standard accent being. The has to a lesser degree become an influential standard variety of the language. Australian and New Zealand English are each other's closest relatives with few differentiating characteristics, followed by and the English of southeastern England, all of which have similarly non-rhotic accents, aside from some accents in the of New Zealand. Australian and New Zealand English stand out 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 aligns closely to British and American English; like American English, collective plural subjects take on a singular verb (as in the government is rather than are).

New Zealand English uses front vowels that are often even higher than in Australian English. Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. An example of a with a South African accent. Problems playing this file? English is spoken widely in South Africa and is an official or co-official language in several countries. In, English has been spoken since 1820, co-existing with and various African languages such as the and. Today about 9 percent of the South African population speak (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.

Most phonological differences from RP are in the vowels. 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. Several varieties of English are also spoken in the Caribbean Islands that were colonial possessions of Britain, including Jamaica, and the and and,, the, and. Each of these areas are home both to a local variety of English and a local English based creole, combining English and African languages. The most prominent varieties are and.

In Central America, English based creoles are spoken in on the Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua and Panama. Locals are often fluent both in the local English variety and the local creole languages and between them is frequent, indeed another way to conceptualise the relationship between Creole and Standard varieties is to see a spectrum of social registers with the Creole forms serving as 'basilect' and the more RP-like forms serving as the 'acrolect', the most formal register. 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]. As a historical legacy, tends to take RP as its ideal, and how well this ideal is realised in an individual's speech reflects class distinctions among Indian English speakers. Indian English accents are marked by the pronunciation of phonemes such as /t/ and /d/ (often pronounced with retroflex articulation as [ʈ] and [ɖ]) and the replacement of /θ/ and /ð/ with dentals [t̪] and [d̪]. Sometimes Indian English speakers may also use spelling based pronunciations where the silent ⟨h⟩ found in words such as ghost is pronounced as an Indian stop [ɡʱ].

The term cockney has had several distinct geographical, social, and linguistic associations. Originally a pejorative term applied to all city-dwellers, it was eventually restricted to and particularly to 'Bow-bell Cockneys': those born within earshot of Bow Bells, the of in the district of the.

It eventually came to be used to refer to those in London's, or to all working-class Londoners generally. Linguistically, refers to the accent or dialect of English traditionally spoken by working-class Londoners.

By the 1980s and 1990s, many aspects of cockney English had become part of general speech, producing a variant known as. Today cockney-speaking areas include parts of,,,,,,,,,,,,, and among others. A costume associated with cockneys is that of the, worn by London who sew thousands of pearl buttons onto their clothing in elaborate and creative patterns. The earliest recorded use of the term is 1362 in passus VI of 's, where it is used to mean 'a small, misshapen ', from coken + ey ('a 's egg'). Concurrently, the of luxury ( from 1305) appeared under a variety of spellings—including Cockayne, Cocknay, and Cockney—and became humorously associated with the capital. The present meaning of cockney comes from its use among rural Englishmen (attested in 1520) as a pejorative term for effeminate town-dwellers, from an earlier general sense (encountered in ' of 's c. 1386) of a 'cokenay' as 'a child tenderly brought up' and, by extension, 'an effeminate fellow' or 'a '.

This may have developed from the sources above or separately, alongside such terms as ' and ' which both have the sense of 'to make a. Or darling of', 'to indulge or pamper'. By 1600, this meaning of cockney was being particularly associated with the area. In 1617, the travel writer stated in his Itinerary that 'Londoners, and all within the sound of, are in called Cockneys.' The same year, included the term in this newly restricted sense in his dictionary Ductor in Linguas.

The use of the term to describe all generally, however, survived into the 19th century before becoming restricted to the working class and their particular accent. The term is now used loosely to describe all, although some distinguish the areas (such as ) that were added to in 1964. Voice of who grew up in, London, from the BBC Radio 4 programme Problems playing this file?

The region in which cockneys are thought to reside is not clearly defined. A common view is that in order to be a cockney, one must have been born within earshot of, the bells of.

However, the church of St Mary-le-Bow was destroyed in 1666 by the and rebuilt. Although the bells were destroyed again in 1941 in, they had fallen silent on 13 June 1940 as part of the. Before they were replaced in 1961, there was a period when, by the 'within earshot' definition, no 'Bow Bell' cockneys could be born. The use of such a literal definition produces other problems, since the area around the church is no longer residential and the noise of the area makes it unlikely that many people would now be born within earshot of the bells, although the, Guy's Hospit, Lying In Hospitall and are within the defined area covered by the sound of the Bow Bells. The closest maternity units would be the City of London Maternity Hospital,, but this hospital was bombed out during the Blitz, and (or Barts), whose maternity department closed in the late 1980s. The East London Maternity Hospital in Stepney, which was 2.5 miles from St Mary-le-Bow, was in use from 1884 to 1968. There is a maternity unit still in use at the Royal London Hospital in.

Home births were very common until the late 1960s. [ ] A study was carried out by the in 2000 to see how far away Bow Bells could be heard, and it was estimated that the bells would have been heard up to six miles to the east, five miles to the north, three miles to the south, and four miles to the west. According to the legend of the bells could once be heard from as far away as the Highgate (4. Gpro Driver Oa Calculator For Fractions more. 5 miles north).

The association of cockneys with the East End in the public imagination may be due to many people assuming that Bow Bells are to be found in the district of, rather than the lesser known St Mary-le-Bow church in in the. Thus while all East Enders are cockneys, not all cockneys are East Enders. [ ] The traditional core districts of the are,,,,,,,,,,,,,, and. 'The Borough' to the south of Waterloo, London and Tower Bridge were also considered cockney before redevelopment all but extinguished the local working-class areas, and now is the only cockney area south of the, although can be found as far out as and. The area north of the Thames gradually expanded to include,, and as more land was built upon.

The estate near Dagenham in Essex was built by the to house poor residents of London's East End on what was previously a rural area of Essex, and Peter Wright wrote that most of the residents identified as cockneys rather than as Essex folk. Notable cockneys [ ] • (actor, born as Maurice Joseph Micklewhite Jr., 14 March 1933 in ) • (musician, frontman of the band Cockney Rebel) • (actor, born in ) Writing in 1981, the dialectologist Peter Wright gave some examples of then-contemporary Cockney speakers: •, music-hall singer and comedian •, boxer •, trade unionist •, known for playing Alf Garnett in. Wright wrote that 'the dialect is quite genuine' in the series.

Use in films [ ] • Many of 's early films were set in London. Loach has a reputation for using genuine dialect speakers in films: • • • • • • •. The DVD of this film has an extra feature that explains the used. • Migration and evolution [ ] Linguistic research conducted in the early 2010s suggests that today, certain elements of cockney English are declining in usage within the and the accent has migrated to and the. In London's East End, some traditional features of cockney have been displaced by a -influenced variety popular among young Londoners (sometimes referred to as '), particularly, though far from exclusively, those of descent. Nevertheless, the, double negatives, and the (and other features of cockney speech), along with some terms are still in common usage. An influential July 2010 report by Paul Kerswill, Professor of Sociolinguistics at Lancaster University,: the emergence, acquisition and diffusion of a new variety, predicted that the cockney accent will disappear from London's streets within 30 years.

The study, funded by the, said that the accent, which has been around for more than 500 years, is being replaced in London by a new hybrid language. 'Cockney in the East End is now transforming itself into Multicultural London English, a new, of all those people living here who learnt English as a second language', Prof Kerswill said. Conversely, migration of cockney speakers has led to migration of the dialect. In, planned towns that grew (e.g.

And ) often have a strong cockney influence on local speech. However, this is, except where least mixed, difficult to discern because of common features: linguistic historian and researcher of early dialects in 1890 stated that cockney developed owing to the influence of Essex dialect on London speech. The dialect eventually moved out of inner-city London towards the outskirts of suburban London and into the. Today cockney-speaking areas include parts of,,,,,,,,,.

[ ] Speech [ ]. Voice of, from the BBC Radio 4 programme Problems playing this file? Cockney speakers have a distinctive accent and dialect, and occasionally use. The took a recording from a long-time resident of Hackney, and the made another recording in 1999 which showed how the accent had changed.

John Camden Hotten, in his Slang Dictionary of 1859, makes reference to 'their use of a peculiar slang language' when describing the of London's East End. In terms of other slang, there are also several borrowings from, including kosher (originally Hebrew, via Yiddish, meaning legitimate) and stumm ( /ʃtʊm/ originally German, via Yiddish, meaning quiet), as well as, for example wonga (meaning money, from the Romany 'wanga' meaning coal), and cushty (Kushty) (from the Romany kushtipen, meaning good). A fake cockney accent is sometimes called.

Typical features [ ].