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The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into three general categories: the British Isles dialects, those of North America, and those of Australasia. [ 2] Dialects can be associated not only with place but also with particular social groups. Within a given English-speaking country, there is a form of the language ...
v. t. e. English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. [ 4][ 5][ 6] The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain.
The accents of English in Wales are strongly influenced by the phonology of the Welsh language, which more than 20% of the population of Wales speak as their first or second language. The North Wales accent is distinct from South Wales. North East Wales is influenced by Scouse and Cheshire accents.
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, [1] [2] making it the largest language by number of speakers, the third largest language by number of native speakers and the most widespread language geographically.
A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language, or language family. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas . The earliest such atlas was the Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches of Georg Wenker and Ferdinand Wrede, published ...
World Englishes is a term for emerging localised or indigenised varieties of English, especially varieties that have developed in territories influenced by the United Kingdom or the United States. The study of World Englishes consists of identifying varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts globally and analyzing how ...
Most states where English is an official language are former territories of the British Empire . Exceptions include Rwanda and Burundi [also should be on map], which were formerly German and then Belgian colonies; Cameroon, where only part of the country was under the British mandate; and Liberia, the Philippines, the Federated States of ...
North American English is the most generalized variety of the English language as spoken in the United States and Canada.Because of their related histories and cultures, [2] plus the similarities between the pronunciations (accents), vocabulary, and grammar of American English and Canadian English, the two spoken varieties are often grouped together under a single category.