English is a redirect to this article. For other meanings, see English (disambiguation).

The English language (proper name: English [ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ] abbreviated: en. ) is a Germanic language originally native to England, belonging to the West Germanic branch. It developed from the early Middle Ages through immigration to Britain of North Sea Germanic peoples, including the Angles - from whom the word English is derived - and the Saxons. The early forms of the language are therefore sometimes called Anglo-Saxon.

The closest living relatives are the Frisian languages and Low German on the mainland. In the course of its history, however, English has developed strong special developments: In sentence structure, English switched to a subject-verb-object scheme, unlike all its West Germanic cognates on the continent, and lost the verb-two property. The formation of word forms (inflection) in nouns, articles, verbs and adjectives was greatly reduced. In vocabulary, English was initially influenced in an early phase by language contact with North Germanic languages, which resulted from the temporary occupation by Danes and Norwegians in the 9th century. Later, there was a further strong influence from contact with French due to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Due to the diverse influences from West Germanic and North Germanic languages, French and the classical languages, today's English has an extraordinarily extensive vocabulary.

The English language is written with the Latin alphabet. A significant fixation of spelling occurred with the advent of printing in the 15th/16th century, despite ongoing phonetic change at the same time. The current spelling of English therefore represents a strongly historical orthography, which deviates from the representation of the actual phonetic structure in many ways.

Starting from its place of origin, England, English spread over the entire British Isles and gradually displaced the previously spoken, mainly Celtic languages, which, however, continue to exist today as smaller speaker communities in the midst of the English language area. In its wider history, English has become a world language, mainly as a result of Britain's historical colonialism in America, Australia, Africa and India, and is now more widely spoken (globally) than any other language (the language with the largest number of native speakers, however, is Mandarin Chinese). English-speaking countries and territories (mostly former British colonies and possessions) or their inhabitants are also called anglophones.

English is taught as the first foreign language in the schools of many countries and is the official language of most international organisations, many of which also use other official languages. In West Germany (excluding Saarland), the Länder agreed in 1955 in the Düsseldorf Agreement to introduce English as a compulsory foreign language in schools across the board.