What is English?
History tells us that the English language arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and later was influenced by Norman French. English has continued to develop since then borrowing words from languages all over the world. During the British empires colonization English spread all over the world. After the colonization a lot of areas have developed creole languages, but are these languages English? How do we define the English language? What is English, and what is not? As a speaker of the English language I have no problems distinguishing whether or not someone is speaking English, but I still can’t answers the question «what is English? » In this essay I will be changing that, producing an answer to what English actually is based on definitions and theories.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary online English can be defined as «the language of the people of England and the United States and many areas now or formerly under British control», from this definition we can make the assumption that language is related to nationality.
Many countries regard English as their first language, but none of these countries speak the same kind of English. American English and Australian English aren’t different languages, but they aren’t identical to British English, so why don’t we recognize them as different languages? British English, American English and Australian English have the same syntax and grammatical rules – therefore they are just variations of a language, dialects, and not different languages.
Then there are creoles which do not follow the same syntactical and grammatical rules as British English, yet these languages are still considered variations of the English language. How is this? Particularly if you compere creoles and British to Scandinavian languages. Norwegian and Danish maybe mores similar then British English and Singlish, does this mean that all Scandinavian languages should be counted as one language? The answer is no, they...