The Ultimate English Language Quiz

English: A West Germanic Language

• English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family.

• Its earliest forms were spoken in early medieval England by the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples.

• Modern English is genealogically Germanic but shows major influences from French and Latin.

• Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, evolved from a group of North Sea Germanic dialects brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century.

• Middle English began in the late 11th century after the Norman Conquest of England.

• Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London.

• Modern English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and professional contexts such as science, navigation, and law.

• It is the most spoken language in the world and the third most spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish.

• English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German, and Swedish.

• Middle English is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066.

• Early Modern English was characterised by the Great Vowel Shift (1350–1700), inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation.

• The King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare are notable examples of Early Modern English literature.English is the largest language by number of speakers; 400 million people speak English as their first language, and 1.1 billion speak it as a secondary language. By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance, making it the first truly global language. As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published, and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In modern English, the loss of grammatical case is almost complete, and SVO word order is mostly fixed. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans. English is a pluricentric language, which means that no one national authority sets the standard for use of the language. English has ceased to be an "English language" in the sense of belonging only to people who are ethnically English. English is regarded as the first global lingua franca, and is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. English is the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Many regional international organisations set English as their organisation's sole working language even though most members are not countries with a majority of native English speakers. A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine and computing. English has become so important in scientific publishing that more than 80 percent of all scientific journal articles indexed by Chemical Abstracts in 1998 were written in English. The increased use of the English language globally has had an effect on other languages, leading to some English words being assimilated into the vocabularies of other languages.Overview of English Phonetics, Phonology, and Grammar

• English dialects differ in phonetics and phonology without affecting mutual communication.

• Phonological variation affects the inventory of phonemes, while phonetic variation consists of differences in pronunciation of the phonemes.

• Most English dialects share the same 24 consonant phonemes. Fortis consonants are pronounced with more muscular tension than lenis consonants.

• The pronunciation of vowels varies greatly between dialects. Vowel length is phonemic in RP but not in GA.

• An English syllable includes a syllable nucleus consisting of a vowel sound. Syllable onset and coda are optional.

• Stress plays an important role in English, with certain syllables being stressed and others unstressed. Stress is phonemic and can distinguish between words and phrases.

• English has undergone many historical sound changes, and dialects have fewer or more consonant phonemes and phones than standard varieties.

• English follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment and has largely abandoned the inflectional case system.

• English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions.

• Nouns are only inflected for number and possession. New nouns can be formed through derivation or compounding. They are semantically divided into proper nouns and common nouns.

• Possession can be expressed through the possessive enclitic -s or the preposition of. Noun phrases can be short or include modifiers.

• English has regional variation in pronunciation of vowels and consonants.Overview of English Grammar

• Noun phrases (NP) consist of a noun and its modifiers, including adjectives, specifiers, conjunctions, and prepositions, and function as a syntactic unit.

• Determiners are used to specify the definiteness or quantity of a noun, and are the first constituents in a noun phrase.

• Adjectives modify nouns and can also function as predicative complements, but are not inflected for agreement with the noun they modify.

• Pronouns conserve traits of case and gender inflection, with the personal pronouns retaining subjective and objective case and animateness distinctions, and possessive pronouns existing in dependent and independent forms.

• Prepositional phrases (PP) are composed of a preposition and one or more nouns, and have a wide range of uses in English, including introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs.

• English verbs are inflected for tense and aspect, and marked for agreement with present-tense third-person singular subject, with auxiliary verbs such as have and be used to form complex tenses, aspects, and moods.

• English has two primary tenses, past and non-past, and expresses future tense periphrastically with auxiliary verbs will or shall.

• Adverbs modify the action or event described by the verb by providing additional information about the manner in which it occurs, and are often derived from adjectives by appending the suffix -ly.

• English syntax is moderately analytic, with subject-verb-object (SVO) order being the most common, and the use of auxiliary verbs for conveying meaning, such as questions, negative polarity, the passive voice, and progressive aspect.

• In most sentences, English only marks grammatical relations through word order, with exceptions found in sentences where one of the constituents is a pronoun.