English language

English word origin

Angles / Anglo-Saxon

• from the Angles, a Germanic peoples who migrated to the British Islands in the 400s-600s AD.
  • part of the Anglo-Saxon invasions
• English is one of the "Anglo-Frisian" languages

Language origins of Modern English

Origins of Modern English

Germanic	Old French	Latin	Greek	Other	Proper Names
26%	29%	29%	6%	6%	4%

The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century:
Old West Norse dialect
Old East Norse dialect
Old Gutnish dialect
Old English
Crimean Gothic
Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility

English vocabulary

• English contains 170,000 to 220,000 words (when obsolete words are counted)
  • when technical terms, mostly from Latin and Greek, are counted, there are about 1 million words

English Language Percent Distribution of Parts of Speech

Adjectives	Adverbs	Conjunctions	Determiners	Nouns	Prepositions	Pronouns	Verbs
2.5	5	4.5	4.5	50%			7%

English Language Percent Distribution of Parts of Speech

Adjectives	Adverbs	Conjunctions	Determiners	Nouns	Prepositions	Pronouns	Verbs
2.5	5	4.5	4.5	50%			7%