I am a historian who study events of the past.

My aim includes obtaining historical

data from libraries, archives and artifacts, determining the authenticity of historical
data.

ENGLISH TODAY

The English language we use today is constantly adapting and evolving to suit our
fast-paced lives.
Approximately 375 million people across the globe speak English and more than
50 countries have English either as their official or primary language.
Studies show that 51% of Europeans speak English in addition to their mother
tongue.
Over one billion people are learning to speak English, making it one of the most
dominant languages in the world.
The rise of the Internet, mobile phones and social media have led to a huge
increase in the use of the English language.

Modern English can be regarded externally as starting with the introduction of

printing.
It contributed to the development of a stenderdaised variety of the language, with
fixed spelling and punctuation conventions and accepted vocabulary and
grammatical forms.

An internal fichure which characterised the movement towards Modern English

was the Great Vowel Shift – an important series of linked pronunciation changes
which mainly took place between the 15th and 17th centuries.
In Modern English, the sound system had contained broadly corresponding series
of long and short vowels, represented in writing by the same letters.
In Modern English, people began to pronounce the long vowels differently from the
corresponding short vowels. These changes were not reflected in Modern English
spelling because it already largly fixed by standardisation.
On the other hand, adding to the disperiry between pronunciation and writing which
differentiates English today from most other European languages.

https://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english
25 maps that explain the English language
It reflects the influences of centuries of international exchange, including conquest
and colonization, from the Vikings through the 21st century. Here are 25 maps and
charts that explain how English got started and evolved into the differently
accented languages spoken today.
1) Where English comes from
English, like more than 400 other languages, is part of the Indo-European
language family, sharing common roots not just with German and French but with
Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian.
2) This map shows where Indo-European languages are spoken in Europe, the
Middle East, and South Asia today, and makes it easier to see what languages
don’t share a common root with English: Finnish and Hungarian among them.
3) The Anglo-Saxon migration
Here’s how the English language got started: After Roman troops withdrew from
Britain in the early 5th century, they brought with them the Anglo-Saxon language,
which combined with some Celtic and Latin words to create Old English.
Still, though the gender of nouns has fallen away in English, 4,500 Anglo-Saxon
words survive today.
They make up only about 1 percent of the comprehensive Oxford English
Dictionary, but nearly all of the most commonly used words that are the backbone
of English.

4) The Danelaw
The next source of English was Old Norse. Vikings from present-day Denmark who
raided the eastern coastline of the British Isles in the 9th century. Their language
was probably understandable by speakers of English. But Old Norse words were
absorbed into English.
5)The Norman Conquest
Anglo-Norman became the language of the medieval elite. In some cases, Norman
words ousted the Old English words.The combination of Anglo-Norman and Old
English led to Middle English, the language of Chaucer.
6) The Great Vowel Shift
Some words, particularly words with “ea,” kept their old pronounciation. (And
Northern English dialects were less affected, one reason they still have a
distinctive accent.) This shift is how Middle English became modern English.

7) The colonization of America

Puritans from East Anglia contributed to the classic Boston accent; Royalists
migrating to the South brought a drawl; and Scots-Irish moved to the Appalaichans.
Today’s American English is actually closer to 18th-century British English in
pronunciation than current-day British English is.
8) Early exploration of Australia
Many of the first Europeans to settle in Australia, unlike the US, doesn’t have a lot
of regional accents.
But it does have many vocabulary words borrowed from Aboriginal languages:
kangaroo, boomerang, and wombat among them.
9) Canada
Canadian English sounds a lot like American English, but it’s maintained many of
the “ou” words from its British parent. Canada is undergoing a vowel shift of its
own.
But unlike British and American English, which has a variety of regional accents,
Canadian English is fairly homogenous.
10) English in India
The period of British colonialism established English as the governing language. It
still is, in part due to India’s incredible linguistic diversity.
But languages from the subcontinent contributed to English, too. Also, it shows that
language exchange during the colonial era was a two-way street.
11) Tristan da Cunha
It’s also the furthest-flung locaction of native English speakers. Tristan da Cunha is
part of a British overseas territory.
Tristan da Cunha English has a few unusual features: double negatives are
common, as is the use of “done” in the past tense (“He done walked up the road.”)
English around the world
12) Countries with English as the official language
Fifty-eight countries have English as an official language. This doesn’t include most
of the biggest English-speaking countries.
The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom don’t have official
languages.
13) Which countries in Europe can speak English
English is one of the three official “procedural languages” of the European Union.
The president of German recently suggested making it the only official language.
But how well people in each European Union country speak English varies
considerably.

15) Where new English words come from

Most words come originally from Germanic languages, Romance languages, or
Latin, or are formed from English words already in use.

16) How vocabulary changes based on what you’re writing

The Enlightenment brought an influx of Greek and Latin words into English —
words for scientific concepts that moved into broader use as science developed.
Scientific vocabulary is still usually based on Greek or Latin roots that aren’t used
in ordinary conversation.

21) Where Cockneys come from

The distinctive Cockney accent or dialect is best known for its rhyming slang, which
dates back to at least the 19th century. The slang starts as rhymes, but often the
rhyming word is dropped.
For example: “to have a butcher’s,” meaning “to take a look,” came from the
rhyming of “butcher’s hook” with “look.”
22) Dialects and accents in Britain
The generic British accent, meanwhile, is known as “Received Pronunciation,”
which is basically a Southern English accent used among the elite that erases
regional differences.
For example: In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by
a shortage of native English-speaking teachers.

An estimated 300 million Chinese read and write English but don't get enough
quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and
more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of
a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you.

They're each pronounced with tone — the linguistic feature that gives spoken
Mandarin its musical quality — adding a specific pitch to words to alter their
meaning. According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-
English hybrids.

Any language is constantly evolving, so it's not surprising that English, transplantid
to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit.

The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages
over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian.

A less familiar example is Erabic: The speakers of its myriad dailects are
connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through
the homogenaized Erab