APRIL 23 INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ENGLISH – Today the official language of about 60 countries across the globe, the second required language in most parts of the world, the language of international commerce and communication, and civil aviation, English was once the unobtrusive mother tongue of a West Germanic tribe, the Angles, scattered on coastal islands of Western Europe.

Today it is more or less our Lingua Franca, carrying the imprint of every language it has ever crossed paths with. It is one of the most adaptable, flexible and continuously evolving, growing languages out there. So much so that you could justifiably argue that in its present day form it can no longer count as a language of its own but rather an amalgam of all the languages it has ever been in contact with.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

– James Nicoll

The bulk of modern English is made up of 29% Latin, 29% French and 26% Germanic languages. If you add the rest, including 6% Greek, you get a language that can sound familiar to quite a lot of people. Especially as English tends to keep the original spelling of borrowed foreign words (e.g. bazaar – Persian, kindergarten – German, café – French) or adapts and integrates them as recognizable loanwords (e.g. avatar – Hindi, voodoo – African, tattoo – Pacific Islands).

No wonder the English language boasts the world’s largest dictionary with over 615,000 words, which would add up to more than a million if you included all the technical and scientific vocab. They say Shakespeare alone invented 1,700 words, and by some estimates, the English lexicon continues to expand by well over 9,000 words each year, a new word is added to the dictionary every two hours. There’s also no greater treasury of synonyms than ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’. However, an average adult English speaker uses only about 20,000 – 40,000 words actively. And who knows how many of these are crutch words, ‘like, basically, so, you know, like, actually.’

For linguaphiles, however, English can be the source of sheer delight. Think of all those delish homophones, homographs, homo- and heteronyms, the same words skipping around in various parts of speech, leaving behind a trace of context-dependant plural meanings… A pure orgy of grammatical rules and exceptions, inconsistencies and randomness. So some creative thinking, linguistic skills and logic, plus a little perversion, can come in handy when you’re trying to grasp it.

English makes the sentence ‘which witch watches which watch’ possible, and also somewhat sadistic for ESL students, and if you put emphasis on a different word each time you say ‘I never said she stole my money.’, it literally has 7 different meanings.

Or consider the consistencies (missing) in:

They’re there with their three geese and three moose.

Or the variety in pronouncing ‘ea’ in the sentence:

She’s a beauty but I heard her beau’s a bean head.

Or the possible spellings of the ‘sh’ sound, for example:

The ambitious Oceanian passionately drank the champagne from his sugarpie’s shoe.

Or the impossible spelling of ‘queueing’. I mean, if this verb was spelled more realistically, ‘I am’ would cease to be the shortest sentence in English, because ‘I q’ would be one letter shorter.

I may even live to see the day, considering how flexible the English language is.

You can use the same word as a noun and verb, (and adjective and adverb even):

Silence the fight. Fight the silence.
He backed (with his back) all the way back to the back entrance.

You can create new words by playing around with prefixes and suffixes (e.g. ‘wellness’, since 1957), or fuse together existing ones into compounds (e.g. ‘butterfingers’).

You can also make a neat little sentence with all the letters of the alphabet (a pangram), and barely have to use the same letter twice:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

(English pangram / 26-letter-alphabet)

Egy hűtlen vejét fülöncsípő, dühös mexikói úr Wesselényinél kaszál Quitóban.

(Hungarian pangram / 44-letter-alphabet)

Mind you, the English alphabet consists of only 26 letters, but that’s all you’ve got for spelling its 46 different sounds.

Nevertheless, learning English as a foreign language is usually easier because its grammar is less complicated than most languages. You don’t have to deal with noun genders (is it ‘le tableau or la table’?), to sweat about using the right formal address (‘you’ in German could be ‘du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, Ihr or euch’), to worry about case forms (English has 3 altogether – Finnish has 15 for every noun), or the right verb form (English usually manages with 3-5, while Latin, for example, has about 120 possibilities).

So, as more and more people learn and use English all around the world, which has become more of a necessity than a bonus, we all contribute to shaping and changing this language.
Linguists, for example, predict that the sound ‘th’ will completely vanish from spoken English by 2066 (making ‘thanks’ either ‘tanks’ or ‘fanks’, for example) because so many foreigners struggle with its pronunciation, influencing the language by their numbers. Communication-driven and less ‘proper’ English used by non-native speakers globally is already more widespread than all the English dialects (British, American, Australian, etc) put together. The changing needs of language users, the need to name new inventions, discoveries, phenomena, also plays a major role in its development and growth. Added the slang, texting-born abbreviations and OMG, who knows what’s English or not anymore, LOL.
If you compared the English of Beowulf, the oldest surviving long poem in Old English dating back to 700-1000 AD, and modern-day English, you’d probably think they were two different languages.

As global-awareness grows, the need for people all around the world to communicate and be in contact with each other also increases, and English has proven to be a great tool for achieving and maintaining this. Not because it is a language that has conquered the world but because it is a language that can help us conquer the world. If we are connected, does it really matter what serves to unify us?

And now go and ‘give papa a cup of proper coffee in a copper coffee cup’.

Can you work out the answers to these English riddles?

1. What has a face and two hands but no arms or legs?
2. What type of cheese is made backwards?
3. Which letter of the alphabet has the most water?
4. What begins with T, ends with T and has T in it?
5. Which month has 28 days?
6. What do the words ‘purple, month, silver, orange’ have in common?