World English
| International English | |
|---|---|
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Early forms
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| Latin (English alphabet) | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | en |
| ISO 639-2 | eng |
| ISO 639-3 | |
International English is the concept of the English language as a global means of communication in numerous dialects, and also the movement towards an international standard for the language.It is also referred to as Global English, World English, Common English, Continental English, General English, Engas (English as associate language), or Globish. Sometimes, these terms refer simply to the array of varieties of English spoken throughout the world.
Sometimes, "international English" and the related terms above refer to a desired standardisation, i.e. Standard English; however, there is no consensus on the path to this goal. There have been many proposals for making International English more accessible to people from different nationalities. Basic English is an example, but it failed to make progress. More recently, there have been proposals for English as a lingua franca (ELF). It has also been argued that International English is held back by its traditional spelling. There has been slow progress in adopting alternate spellings.
The modern concept of International English does not exist in isolation, but is the product of centuries of development of the English language.
The English language evolved in England, from a set of West Germanic dialects spoken by the Angles and Saxons, who arrived from continental Europe in the 5th century. Those dialects came to be known as Englisc (literally "Anglish"), the language today referred to as Anglo-Saxon or Old English (the language of the poem Beowulf). However, less than a quarter of the vocabulary of Modern English is derived from the shared ancestry with other West Germanic languages because of extensive borrowings from Norse, Norman, Latin, and other languages. It was during the Viking invasions of the Anglo-Saxon period that Old English was influenced by contact with Norse, a group of North Germanic dialects spoken by the Vikings, who came to control a large region in the North of England known as the Danelaw. Vocabulary items entering English from Norse (including the pronouns they, and them) are thus attributable to the on-again-off-again Viking occupation of Northern England during the centuries prior to the Norman Conquest (see, e.g., Canute the Great). Soon after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Englisc language ceased being a literary language (see, e.g., Ormulum) and was replaced by Anglo-Norman as the written language of England. During the Norman Period, English absorbed a significant component of French vocabulary (approximately one-third of the vocabulary of Modern English). With this new vocabulary, additional vocabulary borrowed from Latin (with Greek, another approximately one-third of Modern English vocabulary, though some borrowings from Latin and Greek date from later periods), a simplified grammar, and use of the orthographic conventions of French instead of Old English orthography, the language became Middle English (the language of Chaucer). The "difficulty" of English as a written language thus began in the High Middle Ages, when French orthographic conventions were used to spell a language whose original, more suitable orthography had been forgotten after centuries of nonuse. During the late medieval period, King Henry V of England (lived 1387–1422) ordered the use of the English of his day in proceedings before him and before the government bureaucracies. That led to the development of Chancery English, a standardised form used in the government bureaucracy. (The use of so-called Law French in English courts continued through the Renaissance, however.)
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