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English is one of the most important languages of the world today spoken by more than 300,000,000 people, end it is the second widely used modem language. Only Chinese is spoken by more people.
Linguists classify English as a Germanic language. Its closest linguistic "relatives" are Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, and Low German. More distant relatives include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Modem High German. Its most distant "relatives" include other members of the Indo-European language family of which the Germanic languages are a part.
The English language as we currently know it is the result of approximately 1500 years of development. Interestingly, the origins of modern English are not in England itself, but in southern Denmark and northern Germany, since the language which eventually developed into modern English was brought by people called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes when they invaded the British Isles in the fifth Century. The Celtic language spoken by the earliest inhabitants of England were displaced and the Celtic-speaking people were driven by the invaders into what we now know as Wales, Scotland, end Ireland. Celtic languages are still spoken in parts of these countries.
Linguists divide the development of English him 3 periods; Old English, Middle English, and Modem English. The Modem English period is then further divided into Early Modem English end Late Modem English. The Old English period spanned approximately 500 years--from around 450 to around 1100. The Middle period lasted roughly 400 years--from about 1100 until around 1500. The Modem English period began around 1500, with Early Modem English lasting until approximately 1750 end Late Modem English from then to the present
The vocabulary of Modern English is probably more extensive then that of may other languages in the world. It has been estimated that the total number of Modem English words is over 1,000,000, if one includes slang end recent technical and scientific terms.
The great number of words in the Modem English lexicon is largely due to the fact that English has been always a "word-borrowing" language. In the Old English period, there were borrowings from Latin, Greek, Danish, and, to a small extent, Celtic languages. In the Middle English period, there were further borrowings from Danish, and also—to a large degree--from Norman French. In the Modern English period, there have been more borrowings from Latin, Greek, and a large number of European and other languages. All in all, English has "adopted" words from more than 50 other languages.