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AN ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
Language belongs to each of us. Everyone uses words. What is it about language that makes people so curious? The answer is that there is almost nothing in our lives that is not touched by language. We live in and by language. We all speak and we all listen: so we are all interested in the origin of words, in how they appear and die.
The rise of English is a story of wonderful success. When Julius Caesar ['si:za] landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English did not exist. Five hundred years later, in the 5th century, English was already spoken by the people who inhabited Great Britain but they were not many, and their English was not the language we know today. Nearly a thousand years later, at the end of the 16th century, when William Shakespeare created his works. English was the native language of about 6 million Englishmen. At that time English was not used anywhere else except Great Britain.
Nowadays, four hundred years later. 750 million people all over the world use English, and half of those speak it as a mother tongue.' Of all the 2700 world languages English is one of the richest. For example, compare English, German and French: English has a vocabulary of about 500 000 words, German — 185 000. and French — fewer than 100 000. At the end of the 20th century English is more widely spoken and written, than any other language has ever been. It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language. Three quarters of the world's mail and its telexes and telegrams are in English. More than half of the world's scientific periodicals and eighty per cent of the information in the world's computers are also in English. English is the main language of business. It is the language of sports: the official language of the Olympics.
The English language surrounds us like a sea, and like the waters of a deep sea it is full of mysteries. English is and has always been constantly changing. Some words die, some change their meanings and all the time new words appear in the language.
There are several ways to add new words to the language. One of them is by borrowing words from other languages. At the end of the 20th century in English there are many words that were borrowed from Latin, French, Spanish, Italian. Dutch and other languages. When Columbus came back from South America he brought home to Spain new plants — potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco. With the plants he brought their names. This is how these words appeared in Spanish and later were borrowed from it by the English language.
The words that are borrowed tell us about the countries they have come from. For example, many Italian words that are now part of English (opera, operetta, piano) have to do with music. This is natural as Italian musicians have always been among the most famous in the world. Many of the words that people borrow from other languages are names of food.
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