English Language Use and History

Traveling to foreign places can be an exciting experience. It is a wonderful opportunity to explore history and visit places you’ve always seen photographs of and heard stories about. On a trip to a far away place, you can try new foods and marvel at the differences between your home culture and the culture of the city or country you are visiting.

Of course, one of the difficulties of going to a foreign country is dealing with the locals who may speak another language. For those of us who are not learned in any foreign languages, there are many countries in which they also speak English, eliminating the difficulty of speaking a language one is not familiar with, though Spanish to English conversion assistance is still often needed in Spanish speaking countries.

The English language was developed from a blend of the Old Saxon and Anglo-Frisian dialects that arrived in Britain by way of Germanic settlers.

Until this point, residents of Roman Britain had been speaking Celtic languages and Latin. Old English was initially a group of different and varying languages, but Late West Saxon, one of the dialects, eventually dominated, now known as Old English.

Middle English was the result of two periods of time; the first in the 8-9th centuries by the invasion in the British Isles by North Germanic speakers, and the second during the winning of England by the Norman.

Due to the rise of the British Empire, English is widespread across the world and there are many different countries that consider English to be their primary language or whose citizens speak English with as much fluency as another language.

Some of these countries include Australia, Canada, Bermuda, Guam, Ireland, Singapore, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the United Kingdom. English is spoken as a first language by approximately 375 million people worldwide and is the third largest language by the number of native speakers. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by the largest number of people, followed in second place by Spanish.

Although the British Empire is credited with spreading the speaking of English throughout the world, it is also due to the British Empire’s influence that there are many different dialects of English globally. Australian English with a “general Australian” accent is spoken by 92% of the people who live on the Australian continent.

English speaking inhabitants of New Zealand and South Africa also have their own region-specific accents. In the United Kingdom, Cockney, Scouse, and Geordie are three regional sub varieties of the English language, while Southern American English and African American Vernacular English, also known as Ebonics, are two varieties found in the United States of American English.