How did the English language come about?

English evolved from the languages spoken by the Anglo-Saxons and the white Jute tribes who immigrated to the British Isles from Denmark and other Scandinavian countries, as well as from Germany, Holland, and the surrounding area, and spread throughout the world through British colonial activities.

Because of the historical contact with a variety of national languages, its vocabulary has changed from monolithic to pluralistic, its grammar has changed from "more inflected" to "less inflected", and its phonology has also undergone regular changes.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the leading position of Britain and the United States in the world of culture, economy, military, politics and science made English an international language. Today, English is used as a medium of communication in many international settings.

The spelling alphabet used in modern English is borrowed exclusively from the 26 letters of the alphabet. The so-called "English alphabet" is the spelling used by the ancient Romans in their writing. English began to use the Latin alphabet as a spelling system around the time of the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth century AD.

The missionaries at that time introduced the alphabet in order to record the local language into writing, and the problem they faced was that there were more than 40 different sounds in the English language*** at that time, and the Latin alphabet couldn't correspond to each of them, so they used to increase the number of letters, add diacritics to the letters, and hyphenate the letters to correspond to the different pronunciations, and then they slowly formed the Old English language with the 26 Latin letters +& to spell it out, and then the Latin alphabet was used to spell it out. amp; to spell and accompanied by some spelling rules of the writing system.

Expanded:

English is the first language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, the Bahamas, Ireland, Barbados, Bermuda, Guyana, Jamaica, New Zealand, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Trinidad and Tobago.The world's population of the 21st century who speak English as a first (vernacular) language is about 500 million.

English is the lingua franca in Canada, Dominica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Federated States of Micronesia, Ireland (together with Irish), Liberia (together with African languages) and South Africa (together with Afrikaans and other African languages). The number of people who speak it as a second language (i.e., it is not their mother tongue but is the lingua franca of the country in which it is spoken) is about 1 billion.

English grammar is based on Germanic sources, although some 18th- and 19th-century scholars attempted unsuccessfully to apply the grammar of French and Old Latin to English. English has less complex flexion changes than all other Indo-European languages, and has lost almost all of its feminine and masculine variations.

Basically, English has lost the distinction between gender and case, except for personal pronouns, and it emphasizes the relatively fixed order of words, which means that English is moving in the direction of an analytic language (e.g., cat tail can be written as cat's tail instead of cat's tail, which uses the root form of the word cat instead of the genitive affix cat's).

Baidu Encyclopedia - English