english language
english language
english language
Introduction
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English Language, primary language of the majority of people in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, other former colonies of Britain, and territories of the United States. It is also an official or semiofficial language of many countries with a colonial past, such as India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and South Africa. Even in countries where English is not a primary or official language, it is taught as a foreign language and used as the language of technology and diplomacy. English is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and by more people than any other language except Chinese.
English is classified as an Indo-European language. It is part of the Germanic subfamily and is grouped with its most closely related language, Frisian, as part of the Anglo-Frisian group. Other related languages include Dutch, Flemish, and the Low German dialects, and, more distantly, Modern High German (see Germanic languages).
II Vocabulary
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The English vocabulary has changed continually over more than 1,500 years of development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 20 volumes, 1989), contains more than 600,000 words, including obsolete forms and variant spellings. It has been estimated, however, that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the world, although some other languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-building capacity equal to that of English.
Internal processes have led to the creation of many new words as well as to the establishment of patterns for further expansion. For example, the process of onomatopoeia, or the imitation of natural sounds, has created such words as burp and beeper. Affixation, or the addition of prefixes and suffixes, such as mis-, ex-, -ness, and –ist, has given English such words as mislead, exchange, forgetfulness, and machinist. The process of combining or blending parts of words produces new words such as in brunch, composed of parts of breakfast and lunch. The formation of compounds yields such words as lighthouse and downpour. Back formation, or the formation of new words from previously existing words, suggests that the verb jell, for example, was formed from jelly. Functional extension, or the use of one part of speech as if it were another, for example, turned the noun shower into a new verb, to shower. The processes that have probably added the largest number of words to English are affixation and functional extension
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