English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, … See more

As of 2016 , 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is the largest language by number of speakers. … See more

It is generally stated that English has around 170,000 words, or 220,000 if obsolete words are counted; this estimate is based on the last full edition of the Oxford English … See more

Overview of history
The earliest varieties of an English language, collectively known as Old English or "Anglo-Saxon", evolved from a group of See more

The phonetics and phonology of the English language differ from one dialect to another, usually without interfering with mutual … See more

As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment. Unlike other Indo-European languages though, English has largely … See more

Since the ninth century, English has been written in a Latin alphabet (also called Roman alphabet). Earlier Old English texts in Anglo-Saxon runes are only short inscriptions. The great majority of literary works in Old English that survive to today are written in the … See more