English language

English is a West Germanic language that belongs to the larger Indo-European language family. It began in early medieval England and has grown to become one of the most important languages in the world. Because of the influence of the former British Empire and the United States, English is now spoken by many people across the globe. It is the most widely learned second language, with many more people speaking it as a second language than those who speak it as their first language.

English is either the official language or one of the official languages in 57 sovereign states and 30 dependent territories, making it the language spoken over the most areas in the world. In places like the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, English is the main language used every day, even though laws do not always name it as the official language. It is also a key language in important groups such as the United Nations and the European Union.

The story of English began with the Anglo-Saxons, who spoke a group of West Germanic dialects. Over time, the language changed a lot. It borrowed many words from Old Norse, French dialects, and Latin. Even though many of its words come from these languages, English still keeps its Germanic roots in how it sounds and its basic words. Today, English continues to change and connect people from all over the world.

Classification

English belongs to the Indo-European language family, specifically the West Germanic group of Germanic languages. Like other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, English shares special features because they all came from a common ancestor language called Proto-Germanic. These shared features include special types of verbs and certain sound changes.

Old English was one of the languages spoken by West Germanic people along the coast of the North Sea around the 5th century. When these people moved to the British Isles, their language developed into Old English. Over time, Old English changed into Middle English, and later into the Modern English we speak today. During this time, English changed a lot in its words, structure, and sounds, making it different from other Germanic languages spoken on the continent.

History

Main article: History of English

Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, was the first form of English spoken from around 450 to 1150. It came from a group of languages spoken along the coasts of places like Frisia, Lower Saxony, and Jutland by people called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. These people moved to Britain after the Roman Empire left, and by the 7th century, Old English became the main language there.

Old English was very different from today’s English. It had more complicated rules for how words changed their endings, and the way words were put together in sentences was more flexible. Over time, the language changed a lot.

Between the 8th and 11th centuries, English was influenced by Old Norse, a language from the Vikings who settled in northern Britain. This brought new words like “give,” “sky,” and “egg” into English.

The Middle English period started around 1066 after the Norman Conquest, when French-speaking Normans took over England. This brought many French words into English, especially for important things like government and law. English also became simpler in how its words changed.

The Early Modern English period, from 1500 to 1700, saw big changes like the Great Vowel Shift, which changed how many vowel sounds were pronounced. This period also saw famous writers like William Shakespeare and the first English Bible.

By the late 18th century, the British Empire spread English around the world. Later, the United States also helped make English a global language. Today, English is spoken and written more than any other language in history.

Geographical distribution

See also: List of countries and territories where English is an official language, List of countries by English-speaking population, and English-speaking world

As of 2016, 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a second language. English is the largest language by number of speakers, spoken by communities on every continent. Estimates of second language and foreign-language speakers vary greatly depending on how proficiency is defined, from 470 million to more than 1 billion. In 2003, David Crystal estimated that non-native speakers outnumbered native speakers by a ratio of three-to-one.

Three circles model

Braj Kachru has categorised countries into the Three Circles of English model, according to how the language historically spread in each country, how it is acquired by the populace, and the range of uses it has there – with a country's classification able to change over time.

"Inner-circle" countries have large communities of native English speakers; these include the United Kingdom, 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), the United Kingdom (60 million), Canada (19 million), Australia (at least 17 million), South Africa (4.8 million), Ireland (4.2 million), and New Zealand (3.7 million). In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents; citizens with other first languages, as well as incoming immigrants, learn English to communicate in local English-speaking neighbourhoods and workplaces. Inner-circle countries are the base from which English spreads to other regions of the world.

"Outer-circle" countries – such as the Philippines, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Nigeria – have much smaller proportions of native English speakers, but use of English as a second language in education, government, or domestic business is significant, and its use for instruction in schools and official government operations is routine. These countries have millions of native speakers on dialect continua, which range from English-based creole languages to standard varieties of English used in inner-circle countries. They have many more speakers who acquire English as they grow up through day-to-day use and exposure to English-language broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the language 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 – with most including words rarely used by native speakers in inner-circle countries, as well as grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties.

"Expanding-circle" countries are where English is taught as a foreign language – though the character of English as a first, second, or foreign language in a given country is often debatable, and may change over time. For example, in countries like the Netherlands, an overwhelming majority of the population can speak English, and it is often used in higher education and to communicate with foreigners.

Pluricentric English

English is a pluricentric language, which means that no one national authority sets the standard for use of the language. Spoken English, including English used in broadcasting, generally follows national pronunciation standards that are established by custom rather than by regulation. International broadcasters are usually identifiable as coming from one country rather than another through their accents, but newsreader scripts are also composed largely in international standard written English. The norms of standard written English are maintained purely by the consensus of educated English speakers around the world, without any oversight by any government or international organisation.

American listeners readily understand most British broadcasting, and British listeners readily understand most American broadcasting. Most English speakers around the world can understand radio programmes, television programmes, and films from many parts of the English-speaking world. Both standard and non-standard varieties of English can include both formal or informal styles, distinguished by word choice and syntax and use both technical and non-technical registers.

The settlement history of the English-speaking inner circle countries outside Britain helped level dialect distinctions and produce koiné forms of English in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The majority of immigrants to the United States without British ancestry rapidly adopted English after arrival. Now the majority of the United States population are monolingual English speakers.

• Australia has no official languages at the federal or state level.
• In Canada, English and French share an official status at the federal level. English has official or co-official status in six provinces and three territories, while three provinces have none and Quebec's only official language is French.
• English is the official second language of Ireland, while Irish is the first.
• While New Zealand is majority English-speaking, its two official languages are Māori and New Zealand Sign Language.
• The United Kingdom does not have an official language. In Wales and Northern Ireland, English is co-official alongside Welsh and Irish respectively. Neither Scotland nor England have an official language.
• In the United States, English was designated the official language of the country by Executive Order 14224 in 2025. English has additional official or co-official status at the state level in 32 states, and all 5 territories; 18 states and the District of Columbia have no official language.

English as a global language

Main article: English as a lingua franca

See also: Foreign-language influences in English and Study of global communication

Modern English is sometimes described as the first global lingua franca, or as the first world language. English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. Parity with French as a language of diplomacy had been achieved by Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919. By the time the United Nations was founded at the end of World War II, English had become pre-eminent; it is one of six official languages of the United Nations. and is now the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations. Many other worldwide international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee, specify English as a working language or official language of the organisation. Many regional international organisations, such as the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) use English as their sole working language, despite most members not being countries with a majority of native English speakers. While the EU allows member states to designate any of the national languages as an official language of the Union, in practice English is the main working language of EU organisations. English serves as the basis for the required controlled natural languages Seaspeak and Airspeak, used as international languages of seafaring and aviation.

English is the most frequently taught foreign language in the world. Most people learning English do so for practical reasons, as opposed to ideological reasons. In EU countries, English is the most widely spoken foreign language in 19 of the 25 member states where it is not an official language (that is, the countries other than Ireland and Malta). In a 2012 official Eurobarometer poll (conducted when the UK was still a member of the EU), 38 per cent of the EU respondents outside the countries where English is an official language said they could speak English well enough to have a conversation in that language. The next most commonly mentioned foreign language, French (which is the most widely known foreign language in the UK and Ireland), could be used in conversation by 12 per cent of respondents. The global influence of English has led to concerns about language death, and to claims of linguistic imperialism, and has provoked resistance to the spread of English; however, the number of speakers continues to increase because many people around the world believe that English provides them with better employment opportunities and increased quality of life.

Working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine and computing. Though it formerly had parity with French and German in scientific research, English now dominates the field. Its importance in scientific publishing is such that over 80 per cent of scientific journal articles indexed by Chemical Abstracts in 1998 were written in English, as were 90 per cent of all articles in natural science publications by 1996, and 82 per cent of articles in humanities publications by 1995.

As decolonisation proceeded throughout the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, former colonies often did not reject English but rather continued to use it as independent countries setting their own language policies. For example, English is one of the official languages of India. Many Indians have shifted from associating the language with colonialism to associating it with economic progress. English is widely used in media and literature, with India being the third-largest publisher of English-language books in the world, after the US and UK. However, less than 5 per cent of the population speak English fluently, with the country's native English speakers numbering in the low hundreds of thousands. In 2004, David Crystal claimed India had the largest population of people able to speak or understand English in the world, though most scholars estimate the US remains home to a larger English-speaking population. Many English speakers in Africa have become part of an "Afro-Saxon" language community that unites Africans from different countries. Regarding its future development, it is considered most likely that English will continue to function as a koiné language, with a standard form that unifies speakers around the world.

Dialects, accents, and varieties

Dialectologists identify many English dialects, which usually refer to regional varieties that differ from each other in terms of patterns of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The pronunciation of particular areas distinguishes dialects as separate regional accents. The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into the two extremely general categories of British English (BrE) and North American English (NAE).

Britain and Ireland

The fact that English has been spoken in England for 1,500 years explains why England has a great wealth of regional dialects. Within the United Kingdom, Received Pronunciation (RP), an educated accent associated originally with South East England, has been traditionally used as a broadcast standard and is considered the most prestigious of British accents. The spread of RP (also known as BBC English) through the media has caused many traditional dialects of rural England to recede, as youths adopt the traits of the prestige variety instead of traits from local dialects.

English in England can be divided into four major dialect regions: South East English, South West English (also known as West Country English), Midlands English and Northern English. Within each of these regions, several local dialects exist. Since the 15th century, South East England varieties have centred on London, which has been the centre from which dialectal innovations have spread to other dialects.

Scots is today considered a separate language from English, but it has its origins in early Northern Middle English and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, particularly Scottish Gaelic and Old Norse.

In Ireland, various forms of English have been spoken following the Norman invasion of the island during the 11th century. Modern Irish English, however, has its roots in English colonisation in the 17th century. Today Irish English is divided into Ulster English, the Northern Ireland dialect with strong influence from Scots, and various dialects of Ireland.

North America

Due to the relatively strong degree of mixing, mutual accommodation, and koinéisation that occurred during the colonial period, North American English has traditionally been perceived as relatively homogeneous, at least in comparison with British dialects. However, modern scholars have strongly opposed this notion, arguing that North American English shows a great deal of phonetic, lexical, and geographic variability. This becomes all the more apparent considering social, ethnolinguistic, and regional varieties such as African-American English, Chicano English, Cajun English, or Newfoundland English.

Canadian English varieties, excepting those from Atlantic Canada and possibly Quebec, are generally considered to belong to the GA continuum, although they often show raising of the vowels /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ before voiceless consonants and have distinct norms for writing and pronunciation as well. Atlantic Canadian English, notably distinct from Standard Canadian English, comprises Maritime English and Newfoundland English.

Australia and New Zealand

Since 1788, English has been spoken in Oceania, and Australian English has developed as the first language of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Australian continent, its standard accent being General Australian. The English of neighbouring New Zealand has to a lesser degree become an influential standard variety of the language. Australian and New Zealand English are each other's closest relatives with few differentiating characteristics, followed by South African English and the English of South East England, all of which have similarly non-rhotic accents, aside from some accents in the South Island of New Zealand.

Southeast Asia

English is an official language of the Philippines. Its use is ubiquitous in the country, and appears in areas including on street signs, marquees, and government documents, and in courtrooms, public media, the entertainment industry, and the business sector. It became an important and widely spoken language in the country during the period of American rule between 1898 and 1946. Taglish is a prominent form of code-switching between Tagalog and English.

Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia

English is spoken widely in southern Africa and is an official or co-official language in several of the region's countries. In South Africa, English has been spoken since 1820, co-existing with Afrikaans and various African languages such as the Khoe and Bantu languages. Nigerian English is a variety of English spoken in Nigeria; over 150 million Nigerians speak some form of the language.

Varieties of English are spoken throughout the former British colonial possessions in the Caribbean, including Jamaica, the Leeward and Windward Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Cayman Islands, and Belize. Each of these areas is home both to a local variety of English and a local English-based creole, combining English and African languages.

Indian English historically tends towards RP as an ideal, with the proximity of speakers to RP generally reflective of class distinctions.

Non-native varieties

Non-native English speakers may pronounce words differently due to having not fully mastered English pronunciation. This can happen either because they apply the speech rules of their mother tongue to English or through implementing strategies similar to those used in first language acquisition. They may create novel pronunciations for English sounds not found in their first language.

Phonology

English sounds and speech differ from one dialect to another, usually without stopping people from understanding each other. Differences in sounds affect the speech sounds that show meaning, and the way these sounds are pronounced.

This overview mainly describes Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA), the standard ways of speaking in the United Kingdom and the United States respectively.

Most English dialects share the same 24 consonant sounds (or 26, if two special sounds are included). The consonant sounds shown below work for California English, and for RP.

For pairs of strong and weak sounds such as /p b/, /tʃ dʒ/, and /s z/, the first is strong and the second is weak. Strong sounds, such as /p tʃ s/ are pronounced with more muscle and breath than weak sounds, such as /b dʒ z/, and are always without voice. Weak sounds are partly with voice at the start and end of words, and fully with voice between vowels. Strong stops such as /p/ have extra features in most dialects: they are released when they start a stressed syllable, often not released in other cases, and often not fully said at the end of a syllable. In a single-syllable word, a vowel before a strong stop is shorter: for example, nip has a shorter vowel than nib.

• Weak stops: bin, about, nib
• Strong stops: pin; spin; happy; nip

In RP, the sound /l/ has two main ways of speaking: the clear sound, as in light, and the dark sound, as in full. GA has dark l in most cases.

• Clear l: RP light
• Dark l: RP and GA full, GA light

All liquids /l, r/ and nasals /m, n, ŋ/ lose their voice when after a sound without voice, and they can be used as a vowel sound when after a consonant at the end of a word.

• Voiceless sounds: clay; snow RP, GA
• Vowel-like sounds: paddle, button

The way vowels are said changes a lot between dialects and is one of the most noticeable parts of someone's accent. The table below lists the vowel sounds in RP and GA, with example words. The vowels are shown with symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet; those given for RP are standard in British dictionaries and other books.

In RP, the length of vowels shows meaning; long vowels are marked with a special sign in the table above, such as the vowel of need as opposed to bid. In GA, vowel length does not show meaning.

In both RP and GA, vowels are shorter before strong consonants in the same syllable, like /t tʃ f/, but not before weak consonants like /d dʒ v/ or in open syllables: thus, the vowels of rich, neat, and safe are shorter than the vowels of ridge, need, and save, and the vowel of light is shorter than that of lie. Because weak consonants are often without voice at the end of a syllable, vowel length helps to tell whether the next consonant is weak or strong.

The vowel /ə/ only happens in unstressed syllables and is more open in quality at the end of words. Some dialects do not differentiate /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unstressed positions, so that rabbit and abbot sound the same and Lenin and Lennon sound the same, a feature called the weak vowel merger. GA /ɜr/ and /ər/ are said as an r-coloured vowel, as in further, which in RP is said differently.

An English syllable includes a vowel sound. The start and end of a syllable are optional. A syllable can start with up to three consonant sounds, as in sprint, and end with up to five, as in (for some dialects) angsts. This gives an English syllable a structure of (CCC)V(CCCCC) – where C represents a consonant and V a vowel. The word strengths is close to the most complex syllable possible in English. The consonants that may appear together at the start or end of a syllable are limited, as is the order in which they may appear. Syllables can only start with four types of consonant groups: a stop and approximant, as in play; a voiceless fricative and approximant, as in fly or sly; s and a voiceless stop, as in stay; and s, a voiceless stop, and an approximant, as in string. Groups of nasal and stop are only allowed at the end of a syllable. Groups of strong sounds always agree in voicing, and groups of hissing sounds and groups of plosive sounds with the same place of speaking are not allowed. Several consonants have limited uses: /h/ can only be at the start of a syllable, and /ŋ/ only at the end of a syllable.

Stress is important in English. Certain syllables are stressed, while others are not. Stress is a mix of how long a syllable is said, how loud it is, the quality of the vowel, and sometimes changes in pitch. Stressed syllables are said longer and louder than unstressed syllables, and vowels in unstressed syllables are often shorter while vowels in stressed syllables are not.

Stress in English shows meaning and sound changes from older German languages through words from other languages. For example, the word contract is stressed on the first syllable when used as a noun, but on the last syllable for most meanings when used as a verb. Stress is also used to tell words and phrases apart, so that a compound word has one stress, but the phrase has two: for example, "a burnout" versus "to burn out", and "a hotdog" versus "a hot dog".

In terms of rhythm, English is usually a stress-timed language, meaning that the time between stressed syllables tends to be the same. Stressed syllables are said longer, but unstressed syllables (syllables between stresses) are said shorter. Vowels in unstressed syllables are shorter as well, and vowel shortening changes vowel quality.

Types of English change most in the pronunciation of vowels. The best-known national types used as standards for teaching in non-English-speaking countries are British (BrE) and American (AmE). Countries such as Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa have their own standard types which are less often used as standards for teaching internationally.

English has gone through many changes in sound, some affecting all types, and others affecting only a few. Most standard types are affected by the Great Vowel Shift, which changed the pronunciation of long vowels, but a few types have slightly different results. In North America, a number of changes such as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and Canadian Shift have created very different vowel sounds in some regional accents.

Some types have fewer or more consonant sounds and speech sounds than the standard types. Some older types like Scottish English have a special sound in whine that is different from the sound in wine, but most other types say both words with the same sound. The sound /x/ is found in Scottish English, which tells loch from lock. Accents like Cockney with h-dropping lack the sound /h/, and types with th-stopping and th-fronting like African-American Vernacular and Estuary English do not have the sounds /θ, ð/, but replace them with /t, d/ or /f, v/. Other changes affecting the sounds of local types are processes such as yod-dropping, yod-coalescence, and reduction of consonant clusters.

GA and RP differ in their pronunciation of historical /r/ after a vowel at the end of a syllable. GA is a rhotic type, meaning that it says /r/ at the end of a syllable, but RP is non-rhotic, meaning that it loses /r/ in that place. English types are called rhotic or non-rhotic depending on whether they keep /r/ like GA or lose it like RP.

There is complex type variation in words with the open front and open back vowels /æ ɑː ɒ ɔː/. These four vowels are only told apart in RP, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In GA, these vowels merge to three /æ ɑ ɔ/, and in Canadian English, they merge to two /æ ɑ/.

Orthography

English has been written with the English alphabet since the 9th century. Before that, Old English was sometimes written with special letters called Anglo-Saxon runes, but most Old English writings used the Old English Latin alphabet.

English spelling can be tricky because it mixes rules from French, Latin, and Greek with the older Germanic system. The way words are spelled doesn’t always match how they sound, unlike some other European languages that have made spelling easier to learn. There are also small spelling differences between British and American English.

Even though English spelling can be hard to learn, it does help show the history of words. For example, the words photograph, photography, and photographic all look similar because they share the same root. Most letters usually make the same sounds, but there are exceptions, especially with the letters c and g. Vowel sounds are especially tricky because there aren’t enough letters to cover all the sounds, so sometimes extra letters or silent letters are used.

English also uses punctuation marks to help readers understand sentences better and know where to pause when reading aloud.

Grammar

English grammar, like many Indo-European languages, follows a specific pattern called accusative morphosyntactic alignment. Unlike some other languages in this family, English has mostly dropped complex changes in words to show their role in a sentence, choosing simpler constructions instead. Only personal pronouns keep more of these changes than other words.

English uses at least seven main types of words: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners (including articles like "the" and "a"), prepositions, and conjunctions. Some analyses also separate pronouns into their own group and split conjunctions into two types, adding interjections as another class. English also has many helper verbs, such as "have" and "do," that help show timing and mood. Questions are formed using helper verbs and changing the order of words.

Some features from Germanic languages remain in English, such as irregularly changing the word stem (like "speak/spoke" or "foot/feet") and weak stems that add endings (like "love/loved"). Traces of old case and gender systems appear in pronouns (like "he/him"), and we see older verb forms in the verb "to be."

The seven word classes are shown in this sample sentence:

Nouns and noun phrases

English nouns change only for number (singular or plural) and possession (showing ownership). New nouns can be created by adding endings or joining words together. They are divided into proper nouns (names) and common nouns. Common nouns are further split into concrete nouns (things you can touch) and abstract nouns (ideas), and also into count nouns (you can count) and mass nouns (you cannot count).

Most count nouns add an "-s" to make them plural, but some have irregular forms. Mass nouns can only be made plural by using a counter word, like "one loaf of bread" or "two loaves of bread."

Regular plural formation:

• Singular: cat, dog
• Plural: cats, dogs

Irregular plural formation:

• Singular: man, woman, foot, fish, ox, knife, mouse
• Plural: men, women, feet, fish, oxen, knives, mice

Possession can be shown with the "-'s" ending or the word "of." Historically, "-'s" was used for living things, while "of" was for non-living things, but now people use both ways. The "-'s" ending is written with an apostrophe after the "s" for singular nouns and after the "s" for plural nouns already ending in "s."

Possessive constructions:

• With "-'s": "The woman's husband's child"
• With "of": "The child of the husband of the woman"

Nouns can form noun phrases, which are groups of words acting together as a single noun. These can be simple, like "the man," or more complex with descriptors and joined nouns. No matter how long, a noun phrase works as one unit in a sentence.

The class of determiners, words like "the," "a," "some," and "many," come before nouns to show if they are definite (already known) or indefinite (not known). They also show quantity, like "one" or "many," and must match the noun in number.

Adjectives

English adjectives are words like "good," "big," "interesting," and "Canadian" that describe nouns. They usually come before the nouns they describe and after determiners. In English, adjectives do not change form to match the noun they describe, unlike in many other languages. For example, "the slender boy" and "many slender girls" both use "slender" without change.

Some adjectives change to show comparison, like "small," "smaller," and "smallest." Some have irregular forms, like "good," "better," and "best." Others use "more" or "most," like "happier" or "more happy."

Determiners

English determiners are words like "the," "each," "many," "some," and "which" that come before nouns in sentences. They help show if the noun is definite or indefinite and often match the noun in number.

Pronouns, case, and person

English pronouns keep some old features of case and gender. Personal pronouns change between subjective and objective forms, like "I/me" or "he/him." There is also a way to show if something is animate (living) or not in the third person singular, and a gender choice between feminine, epicene (they), and masculine.

Possessive pronouns come in two forms: one that works like a determiner before a noun ("my chair") and one that stands alone like a noun ("the chair is mine"). English no longer uses the old second person singular pronoun "thou."

Both second and third person pronouns share the same forms for singular and plural in most cases, except for reflexive forms. Some dialects have new plural forms like "y'all" or "youse." In the third person, "they" is used for both plural and singular, especially as a gender-neutral option.

Pronouns help point to people or objects in a conversation or refer back to things already mentioned. Reflexive pronouns are used when the action comes back to the subject, like "he sent it to himself."

Prepositions

Prepositional phrases combine a preposition with a noun, like "with the dog" or "to school." English prepositions describe movement, place, relationships, and help build sentences. Traditionally, prepositions were defined by how they changed the noun's form, but now they are seen as the start of prepositional phrases.

Verbs and verb phrases

English verbs change for tense (past or present) and aspect (how an action happens), and they match with a third person present singular subject. Only the verb "to be" still changes for plural and first and second person subjects. Helper verbs like "have" and "be" work with main verbs in different forms to make complex tenses and moods. These helpers can be used at the start of questions and with negations.

Most verbs have six forms: plain present, third person singular present, past, plain form (used as infinitive), gerund-participle, and past participle. The verb "to be" is special because it has different forms depending on the subject, like "am," "is," and "are." Its past participle is "been," and its gerund-participle is "being."

Tense, aspect, and mood

English has two main tenses: past and non-past. The past tense is shown by adding "-ed" for regular verbs or changing the stem vowel for strong verbs. The non-past form is usually unchanged except in the third person singular, where it adds "-s."

English does not have a future tense. Instead, it uses helper verbs like "will" or "shall," or phrases like "be going to."

Aspect is shown with helper verbs like "have" and "be," such as "I have run" (perfect) versus "I was running" (non-perfect). We also have compound tenses like "I had been running" (preterite perfect) and "I have been running" (present perfect).

For mood, English uses modal helpers like "can," "may," "will," "shall," and their past forms "could," "might," "would," "should." There are also subjunctive and imperative moods, which use the plain verb form.

An infinitive form uses the plain verb with "to," like "to go," and is used in clauses that depend on a main verb. Finite verbal clauses have a verb in present or past form, and when helper verbs are used, the main verb is in infinitive form.

Phrasal verbs

English often uses phrasal verbs, which are verbs combined with prepositions or particles to make new meanings. Examples include "to get up," "to ask out," and "to put up with." These can have meanings that are not obvious from the individual words.

Adverbs

Adverbs change how verbs happen by adding information about manner, place, time, or degree. Many adverbs come from adjectives by adding "-ly," like "quickly" from "quick." Some adjectives have irregular adverb forms, like "well" from "good."

Syntax

Modern English sentence structure is fairly simple. It has developed features like modal verbs and word order to show meaning. Helper verbs are used to form questions, negatives, passive voice, and progressive aspect.

Basic constituent order

English moved from an older word order to mostly subject-verb-object (SVO). This order, along with helper verbs, often creates groups of two or more verbs in a sentence, like "he had been hoping to try opening it."

In most sentences, word order shows grammatical roles. The subject comes before the verb, and the object comes after. When a pronoun is used, it shows its role both by position and by case, like "he" as subject and "him" as object.

Indirect objects can come before the main object or after it in a prepositional phrase, like "I gave Jane the book" or "I gave the book to Jane."

Clause syntax

Main article: English clause syntax

English sentences can have one or more clauses, which are groups of words with a verb. There is always at least one main clause, and other clauses depend on it. Subordinate clauses act as parts of the main verb, like in "I think that you are lying," where "you are lying" is a subordinate clause. Relative clauses add details to nouns, like "I saw the letter that you received today."

Auxiliary verb constructions

English relies on helper verbs to show tense, aspect, and mood. They form main clauses, and the main verbs act as parts of subordinate clauses. Subject-auxiliary inversion is used in questions, negatives, and focus.

The verb "do" can be a helper in declarative sentences for emphasis, like "I did shut the fridge." In negatives and questions, "do" is needed because English rules require a helper verb. Negation uses "not," and contractions like "don't" are common. Passive constructions use helper verbs like "to be" or "to get."

Questions

Yes/no questions and wh-questions are mostly formed with subject-auxiliary inversion, sometimes needing "do"-support, like "Am I going tomorrow?" or "Do you like her?" Wh-words like "who," "what," "when," "where," "why," and "how" often come first in questions. If the wh-word is the subject, no inversion is needed, like "Who saw the cat?" Prepositional phrases can also be moved to the front in questions.

Discourse level syntax

English often uses a topic-comment structure at the discourse level, where known information comes before new information. Because of the strict SVO order, the topic is usually the subject. When the topic is not the subject, it can be moved to subject position using passive constructions or cleft sentences. Dummy subjects like "it" or "there" are used when there is no real subject, like in "it is raining" or "there are many cars."

Focus constructions emphasize new or important information by stressing certain words. Cohesion between sentences is created with deictic pronouns and discourse markers like "oh," "so," or "well," which help connect ideas and show the speaker's attitude.

Vocabulary

English has a large number of words, with estimates around 170,000 to 1 million depending on how you count them. Many of these words are nouns, adjectives, and verbs. English often borrows words from other languages, making it rich and varied.

New words in English can be created in several ways, such as using a word in a different way (like turning a noun into a verb) or combining words together (like "babysitter"). Words from Greek and Latin roots are also common, especially in science and technology. English has also influenced many other languages, with many words from English being used around the world, especially in technology and new ideas.

Main article: Foreign-language influences in English and Lists of English words by country or language of origin

See also: Linguistic purism in English

Main article: Englishisation