English language

English is the predominant language of the United States, Great Britain, and other former members of the British Empire. Due to the enormous political and economic influence of the these nations, English functions as the world's major international language.

English is a member of the Germanic language family, but with significant influence from French, a Romance language. This is largely due to the conquest of Saxon-speaking England by French speaking Normans in 1066 AD. English owes some of its structure (it's system of auxiliary verbs, for example) to French. In terms of the lexicon, Old English words are a minority (though they predominate when one looks at the most commonly-used words) whereas words from French are more numerous, followed by Latin, Greek, and other modern languages.

Since that time, English has continued to grow and evolve, borrowing thousands of words from other languages, among them French, Latin, Greek, and Spanish, as well as generating new words of its own. In large part as a result, English has one of the largest lexicons (vocabularies) of any world language, and is particularly rich in synonyms and near-synonyms. It is the primary (native) language of approximately 400 million people worldwide, as well as a secondary, or learned language of 600 million more. There are estimated to be nearly one billion people currently learning English.

English spelling, though originally phonetic, has evolved considerably over time. By the Middle English period, spelling had become quite variable, and standard spellings did not evolve until the late seventeenth century. In the United States, the lexicographer Noah Webster argued for simplifying some spelling which were no longer phonetic, such as the -our in words such as "colour". Most, though not all, of his proposed changes were adopted, such that US English spelling differs from UK English in some hundreds of instances. UK English spelling is the standard in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and most of the Commonwealth of Nations including Canada and Australia; US English spelling is the standard in the United States and its territories.

The term "English" may also be used to refer to a person from the United Kingdom born in the country of England.