had only about 1 percent the number of cases seen abroad.
Culture & Religion
English is the third most widely used language in the world, behind Mandarin and Spanish, with about one in seven people worldwide able to speak it. There are about 375 million native speakers and about 220 million more people use it as their second language. It’s often used for work and travel, making it the most international language today.
English 101
English began as a Germanic language, not a Romance language, as many people assume. Romance languages, like French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian, come from the far western reaches of the Roman Empire, where people spoke common, or vulgar, Latin. Germanic tribes (Saxons, Angles, from whom we get the word “English,” and Jutes) came to Britain around 449 CE, pushing out the Celtic Britons or making them speak English instead of the old Celtic languages. Some Celtic languages, like Welsh, Irish Gaelic, and Scottish Gallic, are still hanging on today. The Germanic dialects of these different tribes became what is now called Old English. Old English did not sound or look much like the English spoken today. If a time machine dropped you off back then, and you did not immediately kill everyone around you with disease, you would be unlikely to understand more than a few words. Around 800 CE, Danish and Norse pirates, also called Vikings, came to the country and established Danelaw, adding many Norse loanwords.
Not all Nordic people were Vikings, not even the Vikings. The word viking is a verb, to leave one’s home for adventure and fortune, and those who did it were vikingrs. The majority of people were farmers and tradespeople, just like in other countries.
And they didn’t wear helmets with horns like this one. Sorry, everybody.
When William the Conqueror took over England in 1066 CE, he brought his nobles, who spoke Norman, a language closely related to French. Because all official documents were written in Norman, English changed a great deal at that point, taking in words and dropping word endings. This was Middle English, the era of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales. If a time machine dropped you off and the people did not immediately kill you with disease, you would be able to pick out a few more words you recognize.
If you are wondering where Shakespearean English falls in the timeline, that’s considered Early Modern English. Apart from words we do not use anyone and words that have completely changed their meaning, Early Modern English sounded distinctly different from Modern English (the language, not the band) because of the “great vowel shift.” This was the gradual change in the pronunciation of long vowels, moving them from the front of the mouth to the back over the course of a century or so. “House” was originally pronounced “hoos,” “one” used to be “own,” “plead” was “pled” and so forth. So, if your time machine let you out here, you would probably get by about as well as you did reading Shakespeare in high school.
Scientists and scholars from different countries and cultures needed to talk to one another, so they named things in the languages they all knew: Greek and Latin. Some of those words were absorbed into everyday English, like photograph (“photo” meaning light and “graph” meaning “picture” or “writing” in Greek).
Brother, Can You Spare a Lexicon?
Many other people came to England later at different times, as happens when you colonize half the world. They brought with them different languages, and these languages added more words to make today’s English. English continues to take in new words from other languages, mainly from French (around 30 to 40 percent of our vocabulary), but from many other languages as well. So, a native English speaker is in fact speaking Old English, Danish, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and other languages, and they do not even know it.
Our language sucks up foreign words like a vacuum. For example, English took over 1,700 loanwords from French. Loanwords are words adopted from one language and incorporated into another without translation; they simply become part of that vocabulary as-is. English has given words to other languages too, especially in the modern technological era, with things like “email,” “computer,” and “mobile.” That’s not a new phenomenon, and it’s not just tech. After Friday, the French enjoy le weekend. In an ironic twist, the word “loanword” itself is borrowed from German, but it’s not a loanword. It’s a “calque,” or loan translation: a word or phrase that borrows its meaning from another language by translating into existing words in the target language. For example, “commonplace” is a calque of Latin locus commūnis.
The examples of words in English borrowed from French, German, Spanish, and Italian are ridiculously numerous. This is hardly surprising due to the close geographic ties that the countries and, therefore the languages, traditionally share. These cousin countries are by no means the only languages that have contributed words. Ombudsman, ski, and smorgasbord arrived from Scandinavia. Icon and vodka arrived from Russia. Avatar, karma, and yoga are Sanskrit words.
German
German has given us words of many types, but food words are by far the largest category: knackwurst, liverwurst, noodle, pumpernickel, sauerkraut, pretzel, and lager. There are also science-y words, like feldspar, quartz, and hex. It has even lent us the names of some dogs, not only the obvious dachshund, but also poodle, which I would have laid money was French. A great deal more German words came over during the last century, on account of those pesky world wars. That’s when we got blitzkrieg, zeppelin, strafe, and U-boat, but also another round of food words, like delicatessen, hamburger, frankfurter and wiener, bundt as in the cake, spritz as in cookie, and strudel. And let’s not forget about kindergarten for the children and Oktoberfest (which is actually September) for the adults.
Thanks, Germany!
German used to be the second most common language in the US. It was so prevalent that entire city governments operated in and school systems taught exclusively in German. That was prior to WWI. When the war started, official use of German was phased out in a hurry.
Dutch
We have the Dutch to thank for many familiar nautical terms. Avast, boom, buoy, commodore, cruise, dock, keel, reef, skipper, smuggle, tackle, and yacht are all Dutch words, as are freight, scoop, leak, scour, splice, and pump. If you work with fabric, you have certainly had your spool run out at a bad time. The mother tongue of Van Gogh also gave us easel, etching, landscape, and sketch. War pops up yet again in the form of holster, furlough, onslaught, and others. Let’s go back to food, where Dutch gave English the words booze, brandy, coleslaw, cookie, cranberry, crullers, gin, hops, and, of course, waffle. (An aside, not only are terms like “Dutch treat” and “Dutch courage” not loan phrases, they are old-timey, sarcastic insults, so let’s try to stop using them.)
Hindi
How much Hindi do you know? A lot more than you think. You wake up in your bungalow with its chintz curtains, change out of your pajamas, and into your dungarees
