English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Seacoast, whose languages

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Proto-Germanic to Old English
The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon(c. year 550–1066). Old English developed

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As of 2016 , 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is the

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The phonetics and phonologyof the English language differ from one dialect to another, usually without interfering with mutual communication. Phonological variation affects the

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It is generally stated that English has around 170,000 words, or 220,000 if obsolete wordsare counted; this estimate is based on the last full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1989. Over half of these words are nouns, a quarter adjectives, and a seventh

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Since the ninth century, English has been written in a Latin alphabet (also called Roman alphabet). Earlier Old English texts in Anglo-Saxon runes

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As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment. Unlike other Indo-European languages though, English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system in favour of analytic constructions. Only the

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