English

As of 2016, 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a second language. English is the largest language by number of speakers, spoken by communities on every continent. Estimates of second‑language and foreign‑language speakers vary greatly depending on how proficiency is defined, ranging from 470 million to more than 1 billion. In 2003, David Crystal estimated that non‑native speakers outnumbered native speakers by a ratio of three to one.

Dialectologists identify many English dialects, 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 regional accents. The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into two extremely general categories: British English (BrE) and North American English (NAE).

Since the 9th century, English has been written using the English alphabet, which uses the Latin script. Anglo-Saxon runes were previously used to write Old English, but only in short inscriptions; the overwhelming majority of attested writings in Old English are in the Old English Latin alphabet. English orthography is multi-layered and complex, with elements of French, Latin, and Greek spelling on top of the native Germanic system. Further complications have arisen through sound changes 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 spelling differences between British and American English. 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 digraphs 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 soft c pronounced /s/, and a soft g 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 residues of proposals by scholars in the early period of Modern English to 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 single vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u, y, and very rarely w). As a result, some "long vowels" 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 silent e (as in note and cake). The consequence of this complex orthographic history is that learning to read and write 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, and 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 punctuation marks that is similar to those 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.

Throughout its history, English has been a particularly frequent borrower of loanwords from other languages. West Germanic words in use since the Anglo-Saxon period still comprise most of the language's core vocabulary, as well as most of its most frequently used words. Many sentences can be constructed without loanwords, but not without core Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. English has formal and informal speech registers; informal registers, including child-directed speech, tend to be made up predominantly of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, while Latinate vocabulary appears more frequently in legal, scientific, and academic writing. Prolonged and intense contact with French has resulted in English having a very high proportion of Latinate words – with French loanwords borrowed during different stages of the language's history comprising 28 per cent of the English lexicon. In all periods of its history, English has also borrowed words from Latin directly, representing another 28 per cent of the lexicon. In turn, many of these words had originally entered Latin from Greek. Greek and Latin stems remain highly productive sources for new literary, technical, and scientific vocabulary in English. Loanwords from Old Norse primarily entered English between the 8th and 11th centuries, during the Norse colonisation of eastern and northern England, and typically displaced an Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Many represent core vocabulary – including give, get, sky, skirt, egg, and cake.