English
Pronunciation	/ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]
Spoken in	(see below)
Total speakers	First language: 309–400 million Second language: 199 million–1.4 billion[2][3] Overall: 500 million–1.8 billion[3][4]
Ranking	3 (native speakers)[5] Total: 1 or 2 [6]
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Anglo–Frisian Anglic English
Writing system	Latin (English variant)
Official status
Official language in	53 countries United Nations European Union Commonwealth of Nations CoE NATO NAFTA OAS OIC PIF UKUSA
Regulated by	No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1	en
ISO 639-2	eng
ISO 639-3	eng
Linguasphere	52-ABA
Countries where English is an official or de facto official language, or national language   Countries where it is an official but not primary language
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms ofEngland and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, via the British Empire, and of the United States since the mid-20th century,^{[7][8][9][10]} it has been widely dispersed around the world, become the leading language of international discourse, and has acquired use as lingua franca in many regions.^[11][12] It is widely learned as a second language and used as an official language of the European Union and many Commonwealth countries, as well as in many world organizations. It is the third most natively spoken language in the world, afterMandarin Chinese and Spanish.^[13]

Historically, English originated from the fusion of languages and dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) settlers by the 5th century – with the word English being derived from the name of the Angles.^[14] A significant number of English words are constructed based on roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life.^[15] The language was further influenced by the Old Norse language due to Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries.

The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings fromNorman-French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the superficial appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages^[16][17] to what had now become Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events that mark the emergence of Modern Englishfrom Middle English.

Owing to the significant assimilation of various European languages throughout history, modern English contains a very large vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words, not including many technical or slang terms, or words that belong to multiple word classes.^[18][19]