English Present and

Future
PREPARED BY:
JOHN JAY L. MORIDO, LPT
The History of the
English Language as a
Cultural Subject
The History of It was observed by that remarkable
the English twelfth-century chronicler Henry of
Language as a Huntington that an interest in the
Cultural past was one of the distinguishing
Subject
characteristics of humans as
compared with the other animals.
 It is reasonable to assume that a liberally
educated person should know something of
the structure of his or her language, its position
The History of
in the world and its relation to other tongues,
the English
the wealth of its vocabulary together with the
Language as a
sources from which that vocabulary has been
Cultural
and is being enriched, and the complex
Subject
relationships among the many different
varieties of speech that are gathered under the
single name of the English language.
The History of the English
Language as a Cultural Subject
History of English is a story of cultures in
contact during the past 1,500 years. These forces
shape the language in every aspect, most
obviously in the number and spread of its
speakers, and in what is called "the sociology of
language," but also in the meanings of words, in
the accents of the spoken language, and even in
the structures of the grammar.
Influences at Work on
Language
Influences at Work on Language

The English language of today reflects many centuries of development.

The political and social events that have in the course of English history so
profoundly affected the English people in their national life have generally
had a recognizable effect on their language.
 Roman Christianizing of Britain in 597 brought
England into contact with Latin civilization

Influences at
Scandinavian invasions of England resulted in a
Work on considerable mixture of the two peoples and their
Language languages

The Norman Conquest of 1066 made English for two

centuries the language mainly of the lower classes
(nobles and those associated with them used French on
almost all occasions)
Influences at Work on Language

When English once more regained supremacy as the

language of all elements of the population, it was an
English greatly changed in both form and vocabulary from
what it had been.
 Influences at Work on Language

Contributed to the The rise of an

The Hundred
Development of the important the Renaissance
Years' War
Language: middle class

the development The expansion of The growth of

Science and
of England as a the British commerce and
literature
maritime power Empire industry
 References in scholarly and popular works
to "Indian English," "Caribbean English,"
"West African English," and other regional
Influences at varieties point to the fact that the political
Work on and cultural history of the English language
Language is not simply the history of the British Isles
and of North America but also a truly
international history of divergent societies,
which have caused the language to change
and become enriched as it responds to their
own special needs.
Growth and Decay of
English Language
 We rarely think of language as
something that possesses life apart from
the people who speak it, as we might
Growth and think of plants or of animals, we can
Decay of observe in speech something like the
English process of change that characterizes the
Language life of living things.

When a language ceases to change, we

call it a dead language.
 Classical Latin is a dead language because
it has not changed for nearly 2,000 years.
The change that is constantly occurring in a
living language can be most easily seen in
Growth and the vocabulary. Old words die out, new
Decay of words are added, and existing words
English change their meaning.
Language
Much of the vocabulary of Old English has
been lost, and the development of new
words to meet new conditions is one of the
most familiar phenomena of our language.
 For example:
❑Nice in Shakespeare's day meant foolish;
rheumatism signified a cold in the head.
Growth and ❑Old English stem has become our stone; cu has
Decay of become cow.
English Note: Less familiar but no less real is the change
Language of pronunciation. A slow but steady alteration,
especially in the vowel sounds, has characterized
English throughout its history. Most of these
changes are so regular as to be capable of
classification under what are called "sound
laws."
 Changes likewise occur in the grammatical
forms of a language. These may be the result
of gradual phonetic modification, or they may
result from the desire for uniformity
commonly felt where similarity of function or
Growth and
use is involved.
Decay of
English For example:
Language The person who says I knowed is only trying
to form the past tense of this verb after the
pattern of the past tense of so many verbs in
English. This process is known as the
operation of analogy.
 Thus, it will be part of our task to trace
the influences that are constantly at
work, tending to alter a language from
Growth and
Decay of age to age as it is spoken and written,
English and that have brought about such an
Language extensive alteration in English as to
make the English language of the
eighth century quite unintelligible to
English speakers of the twenty-first
century.
The Importance of a
Language
The Importance of a Language
It is natural for people to view their own first language as
having intrinsic advantages over languages that are foreign
to them. However, a scientific approach to linguistic study
combined with a consideration of history reminds us that
no language acquires importance because of what are
assumed to be purely internal advantages.
The Importance of a Language
It is clear, however, that the language of a powerful nation
will acquire importance as a direct reflection of political,
economic, technological, and military strength; so also will
the arts and sciences expressed in that language have
advantages, including the opportunities for propagation.
The Importance of a Language
Itis normal for a language to acquire through various
means, including borrowing from other languages,
the words that it needs. Thus, any language among
the 6,000 languages of the world could have attained
the position of importance that the half-dozen or so
most widely spoken languages have attained if the
external conditions had been right.
English, French, German, and Spanish are important
languages because of the history and influence of
their populations in modern times.
 For example:
Greek is studied in its classical form because of the
The Importance great civilization preserved and recorded in its
of a Language literature; but in its modern form as spoken in
Greece today, the Greek language does not serve as
a language of wider communication.
The Importance of
English
 In numbers of speakers as well as in its
uses for international communication and
in other less quantifiable measures, English
is one of the most important languages of
The Importance
the world. Spoken by more than 400
of English
million people as a first language in the
United kingdom, the United States, and the
former British Empire, it is the largest of
the Western languages.
The Importance of English
English, however, is not the most widely used native language in the
world. Chinese, in its eight spoken varieties, is known to 1 .3 billion
people in China alone.
Spanish, next in size to English, is spoken by about 390 million
people, Portuguese by 240 million, Russian by 1 75 million, German
by 1 1 0 million, French by 80 million native speakers (and a large
number of second-language speakers), and Italian by 65 million.
 A language may be important as a lingua franca
in a country or region whose diverse
populations would otherwise be unable to
communicate.
French and English are both languages of wider
communication, and yet the changing positions
of the two languages in international affairs
The Importance during the past century illustrate the extent to
of English which the status of a language depends on
extralinguistic factors. The ascendancy of
English as measured by numbers of speakers
in various activities does not depend on
nostalgic attitudes toward the originally
English-speaking people or toward the
language itself.
The Future of the
English Language:
Demography
 According to a recent United Nations analysis,
by 2050 the United States will be the only
developed country among the world's twenty
most populous nations, whereas in 1950 at least
half of the top ten were industrial nations. The
population of the developing countries is
The Future of expected to grow from 4.9 billion in 2000 to 8.2
the English billion in 2050, while the more developed
Language: countries will hold at 1 .2 billion. India is
Demography expected to replace China as the world's most
populous nation in half a century, with a
concomitant growth in Hindi and Bengali,
already among the top five languages in the
world.
 The extent and importance of the English
language today make it reasonable to ask
whether we cannot speculate as to the probable
position it will occupy in the future.
The Future of The growing population of different countries in
the English the world, i.e., India, Pakistan, Bangladesh (since
the population of these areas is younger and growing
Language: faster than the population of the industrialized
Demography countries of Europe and North America), and most
of the native speakers of English live in the
developed countries can be expected that this
group will account for a progressively smaller
proportion of the world's population.
 If the future of a language were merely a
matter of the number of people who
speak it as a first language, English would
The Future of
appear to be entering a period of decline
the English
after four centuries of unprecedented
Language:
expansion. What makes this prospect
Demography
unlikely is the fact that English is widely
used as a second language and as a foreign
language throughout the world.
 The growth of Spanish, as of Portuguese,
will come mainly from the rapidly
increasing population of Latin America,
The Future of
while the growth in English will be most
the English
notable in its use throughout the world as
Language:
a second language. It is also likely that
Demography
pidgin and creole varieties of English will
become increasingly widespread in areas
where English is not a first language.
 As the colonies gained independence,
The Future of English continued to be used alongside the
the English vernaculars. In many of these countries,
Language: English is either the primary language or a
Demography necessary second language in the schools,
the courts, and business.
Cosmopolitan
Vocabulary
Cosmopolitan Vocabulary
English is classified as a Germanic language; that is to say,
it belongs to the group of languages to which German,
Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian also
belong. It shares with these languages similar
grammatical structure and many common words.
On the other hand, more than half of its vocabulary is
derived from Latin. Some of these borrowings have been
direct, a great many through French, some through the
other Romance languages.
 We do not feel that there is anything "foreign"
about the words chipmunk, hominy, moose,
raccoon, and skunk, all of which we have
borrowed from the Native American.
Cosmopolitan We are not conscious that the words brandy,
Vocabulary cruller, landscape, measles, uproar, and wagon
are from Dutch. And so it is with many other
words in daily use.
From Italian come balcony, canto, duet, granite,
opera, piano, umbrella, and volcano
 From Spanish, alligator, cargo, contraband,
cork, hammock, mosquito, sherry,
stampede, tornado, and vanilla
From Greek, directly or indirectly, acme,
Cosmopolitan acrobat, anthology, barometer, catarrh,
Vocabulary catastrophe, chronology, elastic, magic,
tactics, tantalize, and a host of others
From Russian, steppe, vodka, ruble, troika,
glasnost, and perestroika
 From Persian, caravan, dervish, divan,
khaki, mogul, shawl, and sherbet, and
ultimately from Persian, jasmine, paradise,
check, chess, lemon, lilac, turban, borax,
and possibly spinach
Cosmopolitan
English has borrowed from Hebrew and
Vocabulary
Arabic, Hungarian, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali,
Malay, Chinese, the languages of Java,
Australia, Tahiti, Polynesia, West Africa,
and from one of the aboriginal languages
of Brazil.
 Despite problems with faux amis - those
words that have different meanings in two
different languages --- despite problems
Cosmopolitan with faux amis-those words that have
Vocabulary different meanings in two different
languages.
Inflectional Simplicity
 A second feature that English possesses to a
preeminent degree is inflectional simplicity.
In this process of simplifying inflections,
Inflectional English has gone further than any other
Simplicity language in Europe. Inflections in the noun
as spoken have been reduced to a sign of
the plural and a form for the possessive
case.
Natural Gender
 English differs from all other major
European languages in having adopted
natural (rather than grammatical) gender. In
Natural Gender
studying other European languages, the
student must learn both the meaning of
every noun and also its gender.
 In the Romance languages, for example,
there are only two genders, and all nouns
that would be neuter in English are either
masculine or feminine. Some help in these
languages is afforded by distinctive
endings that at times characterize the two
Natural Gender classes.
Thus, in German, sonne (sun) is feminine
and mond (moon) is masculine, but kind
(child), madchen (maiden), and weib (wife)
are neuter.
 In the English language, all this was
stripped away during the Middle English
period, and today the gender of every noun
in the dictionary is known instantly.
Natural Gender Gender in English is determined by
meaning. All nouns naming living
creatures are masculine or feminine
according to the gender of the individual,
and all other nouns are neuter.
Thank you for
listening!