Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns (he, him, his) and has a few verb inflections (speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken), but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings.[39][40][41] Its closest relative is Old Frisian, but even some centuries after the Anglo-Saxon migration, Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility with other Germanic varieties. Even in the 9th and 10th centuries, amidst the Danelaw and other Viking invasions, there is historical evidence that Old Norse and Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility.[42] Theoretically, as late as the 900s AD, a commoner from England could hold a conversation with a commoner from Scandinavia. Research continues into the details of the myriad tribes in peoples in England and Scandinavia and the mutual contacts between them.[42]
As of 2016[update], 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language.[67] English is the largest language by number of speakers. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans.[68]
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Countries with large communities of native speakers of English (the inner circle) include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English. The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the United States (at least 231 million),[71] the United Kingdom (60 million),[72][73][74] Canada (19 million),[75] Australia (at least 17 million),[76] South Africa (4.8 million),[77] Ireland (4.2 million), and New Zealand (3.7 million).[78] In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents, and local people who speak other languages and new immigrants learn English to communicate in their neighbourhoods and workplaces.[79] The inner-circle countries provide the base from which English spreads to other countries in the world.[70]
Estimates of the numbers of second language and foreign-language English speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1 billion, depending on how proficiency is defined.[18] Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.[80] In Kachru's three-circles model, the "outer circle" countries are countries such as the Philippines,[81] Jamaica,[82] India, Pakistan, Singapore,[83] Malaysia and Nigeria[84][85] with a much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English as a second language for education, government, or domestic business, and its routine use for school instruction and official interactions with the government.[86]
Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English as they grow up through day-to-day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by non-native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners.[79] Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries,[79] and they may show grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.[79]
Nigerian English is a dialect of English spoken in Nigeria.[297] It is based on British English, but in recent years, because of influence from the United States, some words of American English origin have made it into Nigerian English. Additionally, some new words and collocations have emerged from the language, which come from the need to express concepts specific to the culture of the nation (e.g. senior wife). Over 150 million Nigerians speak English.[298]
Japanese emigrant communities (the largest of which are to be found in Brazil,[13] with 1.4 million to 1.5 million Japanese immigrants and descendants, according to Brazilian IBGE data, more than the 1.2 million of the United States[14]) sometimes employ Japanese as their primary language. Approximately 12% of Hawaii residents speak Japanese,[15] with an estimated 12.6% of the population of Japanese ancestry in 2008. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia (especially in the eastern states), Canada (especially in Vancouver where 1.4% of the population has Japanese ancestry[16]), the United States (notably Hawaii, where 16.7% of the population has Japanese ancestry[clarification needed],[17] and California), and the Philippines (particularly in Davao region and Laguna province).[18][19][20]
International interest in the Japanese language dates from the 19th century but has become more prevalent following Japan's economic bubble of the 1980s and the global popularity of Japanese popular culture (such as anime and video games) since the 1990s. As of 2015, more than 3.6 million people studied the language worldwide, primarily in East and Southeast Asia.[57] Nearly one million Chinese, 745,000 Indonesians, 556,000 South Koreans and 357,000 Australians studied Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions.[57] Between 2012 and 2015, considerable growth of learners originated in Australia (20.5%), Thailand (34.1%), Vietnam (38.7%) and the Philippines (54.4%).[57]
Dutch (Nederlands [ˈneːdərlɑnts] (listen)) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language[4] and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. Afrikaans is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible daughter language[n 1] spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia,[n 2] evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium (including Flemish) and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union.
In Europe, most of the population of the Netherlands (where it is the only official language spoken countrywide)[5] and about 60% of the population of Belgium (as one of three official languages) speak Dutch.[2][3][6][7] Outside the Low Countries, Dutch is the native language of the majority of the population of the South American country of Suriname, a former Dutch colony, where it also holds an official status, as it does in the Caribbean island countries of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Up to half a million native speakers reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined,[n 3] and historical linguistic minorities on the verge of extinction remain in parts of France,[8] Germany and Indonesia.[n 4]
Brabantian is named after the historical Duchy of Brabant, which corresponded mainly to the provinces of North Brabant and southern Gelderland, the Belgian provinces of Antwerp and Flemish Brabant, as well as Brussels (where its native speakers have become a minority) and the province of Walloon Brabant. Brabantian expands into small parts in the west of Limburg while its strong influence on the East Flemish of East Flanders and eastern Zeelandic Flanders[48] weakens towards the west. In a small area in the northwest of North Brabant (Willemstad), Hollandic is spoken. Conventionally, the South Guelderish dialects are distinguished from Brabantian, but there are no objective criteria apart from geography to do so. Over 5 million people live in an area with some form of Brabantian being the predominant colloquial language out of the area's 22 million Dutch-speakers.[49][50]
Afrikaans is the third largest language of South Africa in terms of native speakers (13.5%),[105] of whom 53% are Coloureds and 42.4% Whites.[106] In 1996, 40 percent of South Africans reported to know Afrikaans at least at a very basic level of communication.[107] It is the lingua franca in Namibia,[96][108][109] where it is spoken natively in 11 percent of households.[110] In total, Afrikaans is the first language in South Africa alone of about 7.1 million people[105] and is estimated to be a second language for at least 10 million people worldwide,[111] compared to over 23 million[6] and 5 million respectively, for Dutch.[2] 2ff7e9595c
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