The Oxford Guide to the English Language [antikvár]

i ' i THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE , The English language is the property of some 300 million people j round the world, and, as a second language, it is spoken, with varying ;) degrees of proficiency, by as many more. It started out as a collection of Germanic dialects, brought by marauding tribes to islands that were already inhabited by Celtic speakers—the ancestors of the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, and the Cornish—and that had undergone and benefited from the earlier occupation by the Romans. These Germanic dialects had affinities with the speech of related tribes in what is now Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. At the time of the migrations all the dialects were probably mutually intelligible. They shared a common system of vowels and consonants, scarcely distinguished in quality and differing only in their distribution. They also shared fundamental features like grammatical gender (the nouns were 'mascuhne', 'feminine', and 'neuter' with different forms of the definite article prefixed to them, and adjectives 'agreed' in case and number with the nouns to which they were affixed); 'strong' and 'weak' verbs (the first changing tense internally, e.g. singjsang, and the second by the addition of ancestral forms of -ed, e.g. look I looked); and a moderately complicated set of endings or inflexions to indicate case-relationships (dative = 'to, from' someone or something, genitive = 'belonging to, owned by' someone or something, and so on), and used them either in combination with prepositions, or more often, in place of them. In the period of some 1,500 years since the arrival of the semi-legendary tribes of Hengist, Horsa, and other tribal leaders, English as a spoken language has burgeoned into thousands of differentiated varieties in the British Isles and, from the sixteenth century onwards, in many countries abroad, especially in North America, Australasia, and South Africa. Now no single variety of English is comprehensible to the descendants of the Germanic tribes who migrated to other parts of the continent of Europe and outlying islands, that is from the Elbe and the Vistula in the East to Norway, Denmark, and Iceland in the West. It has not always been so, but at present two main varieties of English are politically and linguistically dominant—the Received