Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 365ReferencesmodalityEngaPapuanEnglishWest Germanic language which has approx. 325 million native speakers, in England (56million), the United States (232 million), Canada (24 million), and Australia and NewZealand (17 million). It is the sole official language in more than two dozen countries(e.g. South Africa), and is used as a language of commerce in India and Pakistan. Todayit is the most important language of commerce and the most widely learned secondlanguage. The name ‘English’ comes from the Angles, who together with other tribes(Saxons, Jutes) conquered Britain in the fifth century AD and forced the native Celts (Celtic) into remote areas (Scotland, Wales, Cornwall). Three main periods in the historyof English can be distinguished. (a) Old English (fifth century to 1050), with the dialectof Wessex as the ‘standard language.’ (b) Middle English (1050–1500): during theNorman occupation of England (from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 to the mid fourteenthcentury England was bilingual English-French). The effects of Norman French are seenespecially in the vocabulary, where distinctions between words with similar meaningsoften rest on coexisting Germanic and Romance roots: e.g. freedom (Gmc.) vs liberty(Rom.). While Old English was an inflectional language with grammatical gender forsubstantives (masculine, feminine, neuter), four cases, and strong and weak adjectivaldeclension, this structure was simplified as the loss of final syllables increasingly led tothe loss of grammatical gender, the simplification of plural formation, and the widespreadloss of inflectional morphemes. (c) Modern English, as a result, is virtually withoutinflection; grammatical relations which were formerly marked morphologically are nowexpressed by firm word order rules (subject-verb-object). Current orthography ofEnglish, with its wide discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation, represents thesound inventory of the late Middle English period at the end of the fifteenth century (cf.the various pronunciations of ‹ou› in through, thousand, thought, though, tough, cough,could).ReferencesBaker, C.L. 1988. English syntax. Cambridge, MA.Cheshire, J. (ed.) 1991. English around the world: sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge.Crystal, D. 1988. The English language. London.