Talk:English language

Content moved from the phonology section

Regional variation in consonants

There are significant dialectal variations in the pronunciation of several consonants:

• The th sounds /θ/ and /ð/ are sometimes pronounced as /f/ and /v/ in Cockney, and as dental plosives (contrasting with the usual alveolar plosives) in some dialects of Irish English. In African American Vernacular English, /ð/ has is realized as [d] word initially, and as [v] syllable medially.
• In North American and Australian English, /t/ and /d/ are pronounced as an alveolar flap [ɾ] in many positions between vowels: thus words like latter and ladder /læɾər/ are pronounced in the same way. This sound change is called intervocalic alveolar flapping, and is a type of rhotacism. /t/ is often pronounced as a glottal stop [ʔ] (t-glottalization, a form of debuccalization) after vowels in British English, as in butter /ˈbʌʔə/, and in other dialects before a nasal, as in button /ˈbʌʔən/.
• In most dialects, the rhotic consonant /r/ is pronounced as an alveolar, postalveolar, or retroflex approximant [ɹ ɹ̠ ɻ], and often causes vowel changes or is elided (see below), but in Scottish it may be a flap or trill [ɾ r].
• In some cases, the palatal approximant or semivowel /j/, especially in the diphthong /juː/, is elided or causes consonant changes (yod-dropping and yod-coalescence).
  • Through yod-dropping, historical /j/ in the diphthong /juː/ is lost. In both RP and GA, yod-dropping happens in words like chew /ˈtʃuː/, and frequently in suit /ˈsuːt/, historically /ˈtʃju ˈsjuːt/. In words like tune, dew, new /ˈtjuːn ˈdjuː ˈnjuː/, RP keeps /j/, but GA drops it, so that these words have the vowels of too, do, and noon /ˈtuː ˈduː ˈnuːn/ in GA. A few conservative dialects like Welsh English have less yod-dropping than RP and GA, so that chews and choose /ˈtʃɪuz ˈtʃuːz/ are distinguished, and Norfolk English has more, so that beauty /ˈbjuːti/ is pronounced like booty /ˈbuːti/.
  • Through yod-coalescence, alveolar stops and fricatives /t d s z/ are palatalized and change to postalveolar affricates or fricatives /tʃ dʒ ʃ ʒ/ before historical /j/. In GA and traditional RP, this only happens in unstressed syllables, as in education, nature, and measure /ˌɛd͡ʒʊˈkeɪʃən ˈneɪt͡ʃər ˈmɛʒər/. In other dialects, such as modern RP or Australian, it happens in stressed syllables: thus due and dew are pronounced like Jew /ˈdʒuː/. In colloquial speech, it happens in phrases like did you? /dɪdʒuː/."

Regional variation

The pronunciation of some vowels varies between dialects:

• In conservative RP and in GA, the vowel of back is a near-open [æ], but in modern RP and some North American dialects it is open [a]. The vowel of words like bath is /æ/ in GA, but /ɑː/ in RP (trap–bath split). In some dialects, /æ/ sometimes or always changes to a long vowel or diphthong, like [æː] or [eə] (bad–lad split and /æ/ tensing): thus man /mæn/ is pronounced with a diphthong like [meən] in many North American dialects.
• The RP vowel /ɒ/ corresponds to /ɑ/ (father–bother merger) or /ɔ/ (lot–cloth split) in GA. Thus box is RP /bɒks/ but GA /bɑks/, while cloth is RP /klɒθ/ but GA /klɔθ/. Some North American dialects merge /ɔ/ with /ɑ/, except before /r/ (cot–caught merger).
• In Scottish, Irish and Northern English, and in some dialects of North American English, the diphthongs /eɪ/ and /əʊ/ (/oʊ/) are pronounced as monophthongs (monophthongization). Thus, day and no are pronounced as /ˈdeɪ ˈnəʊ/ in RP, but as [ˈdeː ˈnoː] or [ˈde ˈno] in other dialects.
• In North American English, the diphthongs /aɪ aʊ/ sometimes undergo a vowel shift called Canadian raising. This sound change affects the first element of the diphthong, and raises it from open [a], similar to the vowel of bra, to near-open [ʌ], similar to the vowel of but. Thus ice and out [ˈʌɪs ˈʌʊt] are pronounced with different vowels from eyes and loud [ˈaɪz ˈlaʊd]. Raising of /aɪ/ sometimes occurs in GA, but raising of /aʊ/ mainly occurs in Canadian English.

GA and RP vary in their pronunciation of historical /r/ after a vowel at the end of a syllable (in the syllable coda). GA is a rhotic dialect, meaning that it pronounces /r/ at the end of a syllable, but RP is non-rhotic, meaning that it loses /r/ in that position. English dialects are classified as rhotic or non-rhotic depending on whether they elide /r/ like RP or keep it like GA.

In GA, the combination of a vowel and the letter ⟨r⟩ is pronounced as an r-coloured vowel in nurse and butter [ˈnɝs ˈbʌtɚ], and as a vowel and an approximant in car and four [ˈkɑɹ ˈfɔɹ].

In RP, the combination of a vowel and ⟨r⟩ at the end of a syllable is pronounced in various different ways. When stressed, it was once pronounced as a centering diphthong ending in [ə], a sound change known as breaking or diphthongization, but nowadays is usually pronounced as a long vowel (compensatory lengthening). Thus nurse, car, four [ˈnɜːs ˈkɑː ˈfɔː] have long vowels, and car and four have the same vowels as bath and paw [ˈbɑːθ ˈpɔː]. An unstressed ⟨er⟩ is pronounced as a schwa, so that butter ends in the same vowel as comma: [ˈbʌtə ˈkɒmə].

Many vowel shifts only affect vowels before historical /r/, and in most cases they reduce the number of vowels that are distinguished before /r/:

• Several historically distinct vowels are reduced to /ɜ/ before /r/. In Scottish English, fern, fir, and fur [fɛrn fɪr fʌr] are pronounced differently and have the same vowels as bed, bid, and but, but in GA and RP they are all pronounced with the vowel of bird: /ˈfɝn ˈfɝ/, /ˈfɜːn ˈfɜː/ (fern–fir–fur merger). Similarly, the vowels of hurry and furry /ˈhʌri ˈfɜri/, cure and fir /ˈkjuːr ˈfɜr/ were historically distinct and are still distinct in RP, but are often merged in GA (hurry–furry and cure–fir mergers).
• Some sets of tense and lax or long and short vowels merge before /r/. Historically, nearer and mirror /ˈniːrər ˈmɪrər/; Mary, marry, and merry /ˈmɛɪɹi ˈmæri ˈmɛri/; hoarse and horse /ˈhoːrs ˈhɔrs/ were pronounced differently and had the same vowels as need and bid; bay, back, and bed; road and paw, but in some dialects their vowels have merged and are pronounced in the same way (mirror–nearer, Mary–marry–merry, and horse–hoarse mergers).
• In traditional GA and RP, poor /pʊr/ or /pʊə/ is pronounced differently from pour /pɔr/ or /pɔə/ and has the same vowel as good, but for many speakers in North America and southern England, poor is pronounced with the same vowel as pour (poor–pour merger).

Dominance of English

The prohibition of the German schools in the US - prior to the outbreak of world war one - was the highpoint of the fight of the English dialect against the language, which finally has led to the worldwide dominance of English. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.114.39.30 (talk) 22:49, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Do you have a source that says that? I know of American-born American citizens (including some of my ancestors) who were taught to read in German on American soil, but it's hard to say how much that had to do with the spread of English, as all of those persons could speak English as well. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 21:18, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

You probaly don't know yet that the German Americans are the largest ancestry group in the US, and that they represent 26% of the white population. Still in the 1990 U.S. Census, 59 million Americans claimed to be of German descent. But, due to the above mentioned repressions, today doesn't exist an American German language. Moreover nowadays only 1,5 million people declare that they speak German at home. Have you got it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.2.191.120 (talk) 13:03, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

I know all of the facts you have mentioned, but you have just contradicted yourself, because you say there are 1.5 million Americans who speak German at home (I know some of those) and yet there is no "American German language". How can both statements be true? I happen to know that there is a book published in the 1970s (just before when I began formally studying linguistics) called Linguistic Atlas of Texas Germans in the Deutscher Sprachatlas: regionale Sprachatlanten series[1] that describes the use of German as a living native language in Texas. Why don't you cite a reliable source if you are interested in this issue? -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 14:27, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

You refuse to acknowledge the reality and are therefore looking for an imaginary contradiction. Under normal conditions, today there would be at least 60 million German speakers in America. But the forced closure of all German schools prior to WWI and the following anti-German hysteria in the American society have impeded the normal unfolding of the German language in the US. If you search the Internet for "German Language in the US during WWI", then you will find enough reliable sources on this topic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.114.35.10 (talk) 20:52, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia policy requires us to rely on reliable sources and not on personal opinions expressed on article talk pages. If sources on this topic are as easy to look up as you say they are, how about citing a few here? Remember, this article is about the English language in general during all periods of history, so your best source for the issue you desire to have the article mention is a history of the English language that refers to the experience of German-speaking immigrants to the United States. Again, I am a descendant of such immigrants myself (for more than half my ancestry, as it happens), so I am very aware of people being born and growing up in the United States and attending German-language schools (fully half my ancestors in the relevant generation) who also learned from participating in community life to speak English outside school. I still have the German-language reading textbook used by one of my ancestors here in the United States, as well as German-language books originally printed in the 1600s that were brought over here by various ancestors of mine. I have children who speak German at home. The German language is alive and well in the United States today, and, yes, descendants of native speakers of German make up about the same share of the United States population as descendants of native speakers of English. (I also have ancestors who spoke English since the period of Old English.) But where is your published reliable source? What is its citation? -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 22:18, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

You are right: your personal opinions don't matter here. Important are the historical facts and reliable sources that describe this facts.

Such a reliable source is the article "German language in the United States" by Wikipedia: German became the second most widely spoken language in the U.S. starting with mass emigration to Pennsylvania from the German Palatinate and adjacent areas starting in the 1680s. Many newspapers, churches and schools operated in German as did many businesses. It was a German-language paper Der Pennsylvanische Staatsbote that on July 5, 1776, was the first paper to report the American Declaration of Independence. When the U.S. joined in World War I, an anti-German hysteria quickly spread in American society. Many German-American families anglicized their names (e.g. from Schmidt to Smith, Schneider to Taylor, Müller to Miller), and German nearly disappeared in public. Many states forbade the use of German in public and the teaching of German in schools. Later the Supreme Court case in Meyer v. Nebraska ruled that these laws were unconstitutional, but German never recovered its position as the second language in the United States. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.115.80.138 (talk) 21:40, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

No, "the article 'German language in the United States' by Wikipedia" is not a reliable source: see WP:CIRCULAR. DeCausa (talk) 21:45, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Another one of many reliable sources is "German-Americans during World War I" on www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org. World War I had a devastating effect on German-Americans and their cultural heritage. In the fall of 1917, the fight against Germans in Europe was extended to their Kultur in the United States. This battle against all things German included a ban on the use of the German language in schools, universities,libraries, and religious services. Additionally, German societies, musical organizations, and theaters were shuttered and the German-language press in America was forced to shut down. Patriotic organizations claimed thatthe preservation of the German language would hinder German-Americans’ assimilation into American life and, even worse, brutalize young people: Any language which produces a people of ruthless conquestadors [sic] such as now exist in Germany, is not a fit language to teach clean and pure American boys and girls. In most public schools, teachers were forced to sign loyalty pledges, and many pupils no longer dared to enroll in German-language courses. By March 1918, thirty-eight out of forty-eight states had restricted or ended German-language instruction in schools. Ohio, Iowa, and Nebraska passed the strictest language laws in the country; since their laws also prohibited the use of any foreign language in public places or on the telephone, the U.S. Supreme Court declared them to be unconstitutional in 1923 and 1925, respectively. Public and university libraries ended their subscriptions to German-language newspapers, books written in German and even English books that dealt with Germany and Austria-Hungary (such as history books or tourist guides) were stowed in basements for the duration of the war. However, some libraries went so far as to destroy them or to sell them as wastepaper; several of these books were actually publicly burned along with German-language newspapers during local patriotic celebrations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.115.85.41 (talk) 10:40, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

This is not a discussion forum. If you would like to propose a particular edit, do so. Otherwise you are just ranting. --JBL (talk) 15:08, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

I only attracted the attention on an historic event that was a decisive hindrance for the further spreading of the German language in the US. But some editors have tried to negate incontestable facts, which today are well known in the whole world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.113.192.212 (talk) 11:36, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Britain vs. England

English is accurately described as having been first spoken in England, since the earliest English speakers inhabited the Southeast of the island of Britain which is today England, regardless of the fact that OE subsequently spread into what is today Scotland. Linking to Great Britain instead of to Anglo-Saxon England is anachronistic (since there was no Great Britain in this period), uninformative (since the article has no information about the earliest period of the English language), and inaccurate (since English was indeed first spoken in England and only later spread into other parts of what is today Great Britain).·maunus · snunɐɯ· 10:13, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

I have no opinion whether the text should say Britain or England, but it is certainly incorrect to say there was no Great Britain in the period: There has been a Great Britain since rising sea levels cut off the island from the continent over 8000 years ago. Are you are thinking of the UK? —teb728 t c 19:58, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, that is true - I was confusing GB with UK (or with the Kingdom of Great Britain). The other points however still stand.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:37, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

(ec)I agree; "Great Britain" is the name of an island. It is the lump of rock in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean which is currently occupied by the majority of the territories of England, Scotland and Wales which in turn are constituents of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is the largest island of the archipelago commonly known as the British Isles. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:42, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

I think "Britain" is more appropriate because English formed as a distinct language over time, rather than spontaneously when the multiple Saxon tribes settled in the south-east. As there were multiple anglo-saxon dialects at that time, you could equally say English was "first spoken" in Lower Saxony. Also, there were many parts of modern England where English was not yet spoken, while at the same time was widely spoken in south-east Scotland. I accept it is called "Anglo-Saxon England" not "Anglo-Saxon Britain", but I think in this case, given the context, "Britain" is more appropriate as the reader may not distinguish modern region named "England" from the 5th century "land of the English". Rob984 (talk) 09:56, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Use England per Maunus. Johnbod (talk) 15:05, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Spread of Modern English

The section gave far too much prominence to a set of small ex-English colonies in the 18th century, my sources show that it wasn't until the early to middle 20th century that the USA starting facilitating the spread of English and gave far too little prominence to the British Empire and the Commonwealth. Most reliable sources show that English was spread by trade, colonisation, Empire, learning, the need for a standard methodology as well as science and technology. In the early part of the 20th century most movies were silent, then dubbed outside of Great Britain, the Commonwealth and the USA which at that time generated the most English-language films. Subsequently, I have corrected the chronology and given more weight to reflect the sources as well as reducing the impact the article suggested the 13 colonies and then America had on the spread of the language during the 18th and 19th centuries. Also, I have given some weight (backed up by sources) to the BBC, the largest broadcaster in the world, which has helped propagate English world-wide, regards. Twobells^t@lk 23:18, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

I'll check the sources. For geographic spread, through about the first world war, Britain and its empire were plainly the major force. For increase in the number of speakers (a different section of the article, I suppose), the influence of the United States was early and decisive--and predicted by contemporary observers before the British colonies in North America became independent. Thanks for visiting the article talk page to discuss these edits and thanks for citing some new sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (Watch my talk, How I edit) 23:42, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing some balance to this section. Long overdue. Would it be worth spelling out BBC acronym? Some readers who are unfamiliar with the subject might misunderstand it to be a US broadcaster. Wiki-Ed (talk) 20:14, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Until to the end of WWII, English was regarded in large regions of Europe just as an odd German dialect. Only after the emergence of the United States as a global superpower, English has become the leading language of international discourse. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.115.103.207 (talk) 22:49, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 25 September 2015

{{edit semi-protected|English language|answered=y} In the section Grammar/Nouns and noun phrases/Adjectives, the first paragraph contains a duplicated "they do not" (context: "and they do not they do not agree in form") which can be deleted. 2001:470:1D:235:0:0:0:D5B4 (talk) 13:26, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Done - Thanks for pointing that out - Arjayay (talk) 14:12, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Number of words, and "two largest dictionaries"

I realise that this has been discussed before, but I think that the present solution in the article - using the term "vast" as an approximation, and saying that "...counting exactly...is impossible..." could be improved upon.

I think that some sort of estimate of the number, or discussion of what is involved when talking about this number of words, could be included.

As there has been previous discussion, I have not gone ahead and changed the article.

A think a lower-limit could be most easily be included - the number of entries in a large dictionary for example.

There is actually a way of computing this lower-limit included already in the article: "The two largest dictionaries of the English language overlap with each other very little, so the vocabulary of English must be even larger than the count of words in the most complete available English dictionary." but it does not provide the resulting number, and I find it surprising that the names of these two dictionaries are not mentioned.

(I find the statement that they "...overlap with each other very little..." even more surprising. Is it really saying that if I open two different English dictionaries they will have few words in common? But there again how much overlap is "very little"?)

(I have tried following the references given for the statements about these two dictionaries but have been unable to find clarification.)

The number of words in some version of "common-use" could also be reasonably included.

An upper-limit is more problematical, but possible if one defines what means.

There are a number of sources already provided in the article that relate to this information.

More specific information about the number of words in the English language I think is the sort of information that one might expect in WP.

The number of words is probably also a useful concept when comparing languages I think - but I am not an expert on this. FrankSier (talk) 20:14, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

You're right that the "...overlap with each other very little..." is absolute nonsense. I'd stay away from any mentioning of number of words, though, as it is a WP:OR-minefield. Jeppiz (talk) 20:47, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 13 November 2015

please add that english is replacing Irish language in Ireland 65.175.134.44 (talk) 16:42, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Not done: as you have not cited reliable sources to back up your request, without which no information should be added to, or changed in, any article. - Arjayay (talk) 17:04, 13 November 2015 (UTC)