English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. English is genealogically West Germanic, closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages; however, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of French and Latin, plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse. Speakers of English are called Anglophones.

The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th centuries. Middle English began in the late 11th century after the Norman conquest of England, when considerable French and Latin-derived vocabulary was incorporated into English over some three hundred years. Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the start of the Great Vowel Shift and the Renaissance trend of borrowing further Latin and Greek words and roots into English, concurrent with the introduction of the printing press to London. This era notably culminated in the King James Bible and plays of William Shakespeare.

Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent-marking pattern, with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, and a fairly fixed subject–verb–object word order. Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation.

Modern English has spread around the world since the 17th century as a consequence of the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States of America. English is the most spoken language in the world and the third-most spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish. And in America, over 400 different languages are spoken in households (translatorswithoutborders.org). Despite being a melting pot for the world’s culture, The U.S. has a very one-sided mindset about language: all other languages are inferior to American English. In this essay, I will explain the cultural importance of multiple languages, as well as the history of how foreign languages turned America into the nation it is today, and how it affects American culture

Modern English has many dialects spoken in many countries throughout the world, sometimes collectively referred to as the Anglosphere. These dialects include American English, Australian English, British English, Canadian English, Caribbean English, Hiberno-English, Indian English, Pakistani English, Nigerian English, New Zealand English, Philippine English, Singaporean English, and South African English. All of these languages and many more have been integrated into our modern American society over the course of several centuries. Some might even say that the United States is a melting pot of different cultures and languages, co-existing with one another. This coexistence, however, is not without its problems. In many countries, the governments there make it a habit of suppressing languages that are foreign to its own nation. Why? Because for some reason, the view that language learning is a zero-sum game still exists. No matter how much evidence says otherwise, some people feel that if you take the time to learn another language, you somehow miss out on your own language or lose a part of your culture and identity. Sadly, this leads some governments to try and suppress other foreign languages (www.optilingo.com). This leads to certain ethnicities, cultures and languages becoming the minority, and pushed away in favor of the native language of said nation, which becomes the majority. This suppression of language is even found in our schools. Children usually pick up the language of their native country from their parents at home, without really having any previous knowledge of it.