Origin of the English language

2.3 Similarities of the English language with other language

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

During last two decades the question of foreign language teaching received a closer attention in Uzbekistan. The teaching of English as a foreign language is now one of the most important subjects in most countries. And also in our country teaching English as a foreign language is considered one of the most important subjects. Especially, studying foreign languages is developing after the conference of our president Shavkat Mirziyoyev. On this conference, «Since we have set ourselves the goal of building a state-like state, from now on school, lyceum, college and university graduates must know at least 2 foreign languages perfectly. This is a strict requirement, every education should be acted upon,» said Shavkat Mirziyoyev.Shavkat M.M. "Each graduate must be fluent in at least 2 foreign languages", - session of the Supreme Assembly of the Republic of Uzbekistan. - Tashkent, 2021. In addition, after theDecree of our first President Islam Karimov «On measures for further improvement of foreign languages learning» as of December 10, 2012 is a key factor for modernization of teaching foreign languages at all stages, in which the importance of teaching and learning English across the country were pointed out.It is noted that in the framework of the Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan «On education» and the National Programme for Training in the country. So, a foreign language becomes one of the important educational subjects, at all educational institutions.

It is evidenced by the adoption of the National Programms for Personnel Training and a number of subsequent documents that have created favorable conditions for the development of methods in language teaching. Resolution «On measures for further improvement of the study of foreign languages» has been adopted just recently. According to the new document, the study of foreign languages, mainly English, gradually will start in elementary schools in the form of gaming lessons and lessons in speaking in the first grade, and in the form of learning the alphabet, reading and spelling in the second grade. In future, teaching special subjects in universities, especially in engineering and international specializations, will be conducted in foreign languages.

At the current stage of societal development, it is important for academia to educate the personality of a student aiming at the maximum of his/her educational potential opened to the perception of new experience, capable of informed and responsible choices in different life situations. In order to raise such an individual, first of all, it is necessary to teach students to solve certain communication problems in different areas and situations with different linguistic means, i.e. form their communicative competence. Educated in such conditions one should ultimately reach the level defined as the level of the «linguistic personality».

As a result of the transformation taking place in the Republic of Uzbekistan, the process of language teaching today can evolve to meet the needs of people and gain more tangible practical and communicative orientation. Preparation of a person to communicate in target foreign languages is equivalent today to preparation for intercultural dialogue.

Such a situation can be generally noted as a positive development because it indicates an increase in people's interest in foreign languages. On the other hand, society itself is interested in such university graduates who could be recognized by the international community. Accordingly, the practice of language teaching should respond to this situation and to work out best solutions to emerging problems.

The process of foreign language teaching takes place in different ways in different countries. Within the post-Soviet area, this process has its own specific characteristics. In particular, the main problem of foreign language teaching is the lack of rhetoric classes in schools and colleges in several countries. This approach to language learning and teaching has developed due to the abolition of rhetoric classes in Russian schools in the late nineteenth century. From ancient times, the teaching of the native language was conducted simultaneously in two directions - education of rhetoric skills and the study of the theoretical foundations of the language. In the twentieth century methods of foreign language teaching in schools were based on techniques of teaching of the native (Russian) language in Russian schools. This fact has led to a tangible difference in the approaches to the problems of language teaching in our country and in other European countries. This was proved with the excessive grammatical focus of the process of foreign language teaching in our methodology. This situation, no doubt, was reflected in the practice of foreign language teaching, since for a long time foreign language teaching copied main rules of native language teaching. In the end it appeared that many graduates, having a large amount of theoretical knowledge, were helpless in communicating in studied language. It continued until the end of the twentieth century.

The aim of this course paperis to learn and searchcurrently perspective directions of development of foreign language teaching methods are communication skills and implementation of innovative technologies, humanization of the educational process.

The object and subject of the research is to optimize of the process of foreign language teaching involves the development of certain areas of methodical science. These are:

- to explore the possibility of increasing the practical orientation of lessons and achieve the situation in which the goals of lessons are planned in the form of practical tasks;

- to identify ways to strengthen communicative orientation of lessons. To do this, it is important to use interactive teaching methods;

- to include the creativity in the process of language teaching, which takes the form of co-operation of teacher and student. To do this, it is necessary to introduce the idea of «pedagogical communication» in classes;

- to increasingly rely on new information and communication methodologies, which involves the use of modern equipment and facilities;

- to expand the idea of developmental education through the establishment of appropriate training texts and the use of modern and up to date information in the content of exercises performed in class;

- to use of the differentiated learning tasks and widely implement the principle of personality-oriented approach;

- to develop students' speaking skills initiative, which corresponds to the principle of humane learning.

The main purpose of teaching foreign languages in the curriculum is defined as «education of students to communicate fluently in the target language.» To obtain such a result it is necessary to take care of the formation and development of communication skills of students, focusing on the achievements of modern methodical developments.

A promising orientation in the development of the direction in communicative methodology of foreign language teaching is text centrism. In the methodology for foreign language teaching, which has the aim of linguistic personality formation, it is necessary to introduce an organic component aimed at developing students' skills of perception of the text, work with the text, and the text formation.

Significant changes are taking place in the methodology of foreign language teaching. From this point of view the identification of new ways in developing the technique of language teaching becomes an important problem of modern methodical science.

Innovations in foreign language teaching can be associated with changes not only in the objectives, content, methods and techniques, forms of organization and management system, but also in the styles of teaching activities and the organization of educational and informative processes.

The theoretical value of the course paper is teaching English according to the level of learners, and also learning English according to authentic materials with new methods of teaching and learning English.

Practical value of the course paper is possibility of usage of the written authentic materials during the lessons. New methods which teachers use these methods in order to teach learners effectively. Moreover, every English language learners can use this work.

The structure of the course paper, the course paper consists of Introduction, Main Body, Conclusion and Bibliography. Introduction has information about general view of the theme, reveals the aim, duties, theoretical and practical value of the course paper. About How to teach English through songs and poems will be discussed in the first chapter. Using songs and poems promotes the development of various aspects of mental activity of students, and above all, attention and memory. The second chapter will focus on the features of language learning it in high school, in order to understand whether there can be an effective use songs and poems at this stage of training. Conclusion combines the main and significant results of our investigation. Bibliography shows the list of literature.

1. Origin and basic characteristics of the Ehlish language

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europeand western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West (German, Dutch, Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.

1.1 Historical background of the English language

Proto-Germanic to Old English

The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c.?550-1066).By the 16th century the term Anglo-Saxon came to refer to all things of the early English period, including language, culture, and people. While it remains the normal term for the latter two aspects, the language began to be called Old English towards the end of the 19th century, as a result of the increasingly strong anti-German nationalism in English society of the 1890s and early 1900s. However, many authors still also use the term Anglo-Saxon to refer to the language.
Crystal, David (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53033-4. Old English developed from a set of West Germanic dialects, often grouped as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic, and originally spoken along the coasts of Frisian, Lower Saxonyand southern Jutland by Germanic peoples known to the historical record as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as the Roman economy and administration collapsed. By the 7th century, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in Britain, replacing the languages of Roman Britain: Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, and Latin, brought to Britain by the Roman occupation.Baugh, Albert (1951). A History of the English Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 60-83, 110-130 (Scandinavian influence).

Old English was divided into four dialects: the Anglian dialects (Mercian and Northumbrian) and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the 9th century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Cedmon's Hymnis written in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the early period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the 6th century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms.

Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns (he, him, his) and has a few verb inflections (speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken), but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings. Its closest relative is Old Frisian, but even some centuries after the Anglo-Saxon migration, Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility with other Germanic varieties. Even in the 9th and 10th centuries, amidst the Danelaw and other Viking invasions, there is historical evidence that Old Norse and Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility. Theoretically, as late as the 900s AD, a commoner from England could hold a conversation with a commoner from Scandinavia. Research continues into the details of the myriad tribes in peoples in England and Scandinavia and the mutual contacts between them.

Middle English.

From the 8th to the 12th century, Old English gradually transformed through language contact into Middle English. Middle English is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the conquest of Englandby William the Conqueror in 1066, but it developed further in the period from 1200 to 1450. First, the waves of Norse colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English into intense contact with Old Norse, a North Germanic language. Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in the Danelaw area around York, which was the center of Norse colonisation; today these features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English. However, the centre of norsified English seems to have been in the Midlands around Lindsey, and after 920 CE when Lindsey was reincorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity, Norse features spread from there into English varieties that had not been in direct contact with Norse speakers. An element of Norse influence that persists in all English varieties today is the group of pronouns beginning with th - (they, them, their) which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with h - (hie, him, hera).

With the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the now norsified Old English language was subject to contact with Old French, in particular with the Old Norman dialect. The Norman language in England eventually developed into Anglo-Norman because Norman was spoken primarily by the elites and nobles, while the lower classes continued speaking Anglo-Saxon (English), the main influence of Norman was the introduction of a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains. Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar. The distinction between nominative and accusative cases was lost except in personal pronouns, the instrumental case was dropped, and the use of the genitive case was limited to indicating possession. The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms, and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible.

Middle English literature includes Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.

Early Modern English.

The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English (1500-1700). Early Modern English was characterised by the Great Vowel Shift (1350-1700), inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation.

The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English. It was a chain shift, meaning that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. Mid and open vowels were raised, and close vowels were broken into diphthongs. For example, the word bite was originally pronounced as the word beet is today, and the second vowel in the word about was pronounced as the word boot is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages.

English began to rise in prestige, relative to Norman French, during the reign of Henry V. Around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents, and a new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard, developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands. In 1476, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England and began publishing the first printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English. Literature from the Early Modern period includes the works of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I. Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the consonant clusters kn/?n/sw/ in knight, gnat, and sword were still pronounced. Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic represent the distinct characteristics of Early Modern English.

Spread of Modern English.

By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. England continued to form new colonies, and these later developed their own norms for speech and writing. English was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly independent nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. In the 20th century the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC and other broadcasters, caused the language to spread across the planet much faster. In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.

As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published, and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his A Dictionary of the English Language, which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms. In 1828, Noah Webster published the American Dictionary of the English language to try to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.

1.2 Grammatical changes of the English language

As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows accusative morpho-syntactic alignment. Unlike other Indo-European languages though, English has largely abandoned the inflectional case systemin favour of analytic constructions. Only the personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class. English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners (including articles), prepositions, and conjunctions. Some analyses add pronouns as a class separate from nouns, and sub-divide conjunctions into subordinators and coordinators, and add the class of interjections. English also has a rich set of auxiliary verbs, such as have and do, expressing the categories of mood and aspect.

Some traits typical of Germanic languages persist in English, such as the distinction between irregularly inflected strong stems inflected through ablaut (i.e. changing the vowel of the stem, as in the pairs speak/spoke and foot/feet) and weak stems inflected through affixation (such as love/loved, hand/hands). Vestiges of the case and gender system are found in the pronoun system (he/him, who/whom) and in the inflection of the copula verb to be.

Nouns and noun phrases.

English nouns are only inflected for number and possession. New nouns can be formed through derivation or compounding. They are semantically divided into proper nouns(names) and common nouns. Common nouns are in turn divided into concrete and abstract nouns, and grammatically into count nouns and mass nouns.

Most count nouns are inflected for plural number through the use of the plural suffix - s, but a few nouns have irregular plural forms. Mass nouns can only be pluralised through the use of a count noun classifier, e.g. one loaf of bread, two loaves of bread.

Regular plural formation:

Singular: cat, dog

Plural: cats, dogs

Irregular plural formation:

Singular: man, woman, foot, fish, ox, knife, mouse

Plural: men, women, feet, fish, oxen, knives, mice

Possession can be expressed either by the possessive enclitic - s (also traditionally called a genitive suffix), or by the preposition of. Historically the - s possessive has been used for animate nouns, whereas the of possessive has been reserved for inanimate nouns. Today this distinction is less clear, and many speakers use - s also with inanimates. Orthographically the possessive - s is separated from a singular noun with an apostrophe. If the noun is plural formed with - s the apostrophe follows the - s.

Possessive constructions:

With - s: The woman's husband's child

With of: The child of the husband of the woman

Adjectives.

English adjectives are words such as good, big, interesting, and Canadian that most typically modify nouns, denoting characteristics of their referents (e.g., a red car). As modifiers, they come before the nouns they modify and after determines English adjectives also function as predicative complements (e.g., the child is happy).

In Modern English, adjectives are not inflected so as to agree in form with the noun they modify, as adjectives in most other Indo-European languages do. For example, in the phrases the slender boy, and many slender girls, the adjective slender does not change form to agree with either the number or gender of the noun.

Some adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, with the positive degree unmarked, the suffix - er marking the comparative, and - est marking the superlative: a small boy, the boy is smaller than the girl, that boy is the smallest. Some adjectives have irregular suppletive comparative and superlative forms, such as good, better, and best. Other adjectives have comparatives formed by periphrastic constructions, with the adverb more marking the comparative, and most marking the superlative: happier or more happy, the happiest or most happy. There is some variation among speakers regarding which adjectives use inflected or periphrastic comparison, and some studies have shown a tendency for the periphrastic forms to become more common at the expense of the inflected form.

Pronouns, case, and person.

English pronouns conserve many traits of case and gender inflection. The personal pronouns retain a difference between subjective and objective case in most persons (I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them) as well as an animateness distinction in the third person singular (distinguishing it from the three sets of animate third person singular pronouns) and an optional gender distinction in the animate third person singular (distinguishing between she/her [feminine], they/them, and he/him. The subjective case corresponds to the Old English nominative case, and the objective case is used in the sense both of the previous accusative case (for a patient, or direct object of a transitive verb), and of the Old English dative case (for a recipient or indirect object of a transitive verb).

Possessive pronouns exist in dependent and independent forms; the dependent form functions as a determiner specifying a noun (as in my chair), while the independent form can stand alone as if it were a noun (e.g. the chair is mine).The English system of grammatical person no longer has a distinction between formal and informal pronouns of address (the old second person singular familiar pronoun thou acquired a pejorative or inferior tinge of meaning and was abandoned).

Both the second and third persons share pronouns between the plural and singular:

Plural and singular are always identical (you, your, yours) in the second person (except in the reflexive form: yourself/yourselves) in most dialects. Some dialects have introduced innovative second person plural pronouns, such as y'all (found in Southern American English and African-American (Vernacular) English), youse (found in Australian English), or ye (in Hiberno-English).

In the third person, the they/them series of pronouns (they, them, their, theirs, themselves) are used in both plural and singular, and are the only pronouns available for the plural. In the singular, the they/them series (sometimes with the addition of the singular-specific reflexive form themself) serve as a gender-neutralset of pronouns.

Prepositions.

Prepositional phrases (PP) are phrases composed of a preposition and one or more nouns, e.g. with the dog, for my friend, to school, in England. Prepositions have a wide range of uses in English. They are used to describe movement, place, and other relations between different entities, but they also have many syntactic uses such as introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs. For example, in the phrase I gave it to him, the preposition to marks the recipient, or Indirect Object of the verb to give. Traditionally words were only considered prepositions if they governed the case of the noun they preceded, for example causing the pronouns to use the objective rather than subjective form, «with her», «to me», «for us». But some contemporary grammars such as that of Huddleston & Pullum (2002:598-600) no longer consider government of case to be the defining feature of the class of prepositions, rather defining prepositions as words that can function as the heads of prepositional phrases.

Verbs and verb phrases.

English verbs are inflected for tense and aspect and marked for agreement with present-tense third-person singular subject. Only the copula verb to be is still inflected for agreement with the plural and first and second person subjects. Auxiliary verbs such as have and be are paired with verbs in the infinitive, past, or progressive forms. They form complex tenses, aspects, and moods. Auxiliary verbs differ from other verbs in that they can be followed by the negation, and in that they can occur as the first constituent in a question sentence.

Most verbs have six inflectional forms. The primary forms are a plain present, a third-person singular present, and a preterite (past) form. The secondary forms are a plain form used for the infinitive, a gerund-participle and a past participle. The copula verb to be is the only verb to retain some of its original conjugation, and takes different inflectional forms depending on the subject. The first-person present-tense form is am, the third person singular form is is, and the form are is used in the second-person singular and all three plurals. The only verb past participle is been and its gerund-participle is being.

Adverbs.

The function of adverbs is to modify the action or event described by the verb by providing additional information about the manner in which it occurs. Many adverbs are derived from adjectives by appending the suffix - ly. For example, in the phrase the woman walked quickly, the adverb quickly is derived in this way from the adjective quick. Some commonly used adjectives have irregular adverbial forms, such as good, which has the adverbial form well.

2. Development of the English language

Modern English evolved from Early Modern English which was used from the beginning of the Tudor period until the Interregnum and Restoration in England. By the late 18th century, the British Empire had facilitated the spread of Modern English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. Modern English also facilitated worldwide international communication. English was adopted in North America, India, parts of Africa, Australia, and many other regions. In the post-colonial period, some newly created nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using Modern English as the official language to avoid the political difficulties inherent in promoting one indigenous language above another.

2.1 Characteristics of modern English

Phonology.

British Received Pronunciation (RP), traditionally defined as the standard speech used in London and southeastern England, is one of many forms (or accents) of standard speech throughout the English-speaking world. Other pronunciations, although not standard, are often heard in the public domain. A very small percentage of the population of England is estimated to use «pure» RP (although the actual percentage is as unknown as what constitutes «pure» RP). It is considered the prestige accent in such institutions as the civil service and the BBC and, as such, has fraught associations with wealth and privilege in Britain.

The chief differences between RP, as defined above, and a variety of American English, such as Inland Northern (the speech form of western New England and its derivatives, often popularly referred to as General American), are in the pronunciation of certain individual vowels and diphthongs. Inland Northern American vowels sometimes have semi-consonantal final glides (i.e., sounds resembling initial w, for example, or initial y). Aside from the final glides, that American accent shows four divergences from British English: (1) the words cod, box, dock, hot, and not are pronounced with a short (or half-long) low front sound as in British bard shortened (the terms front, back, low, and high refer to the position of the tongue); (2) words such as bud, but, cut, and rung are pronounced with a central vowel as in the unstressed final syllable of sofa; (3) before the fricative sounds s, f, and и (the last of these is the th sound in thin) the long low back vowel a, as in British bath, is pronounced as a short front vowel a, as in British bad; (4) high back vowels following the alveolar sounds t and d and the nasal sound n in words such as tulips, dew, and news are pronounced without a glide as in British English; indeed, the words sound like the British two lips, do, and nooze in snooze. (In several American accents, however, these glides do occur.)

The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, и (as in thin), р [eth] (as in then), s, z, ? [esh] (as in ship), ? (as in pleasure), and h; two affricatives: t? (as in church) and d? (as the j in jam); the nasals m, n, ? (the sound that occurs at the end of words such as young); the lateral l; the postalveolar or retroflex r; and the semivowels j (often spelled y) and w. These remain fairly stable, but Inland Northern American differs from RP in two respects: (1) r following vowels is preserved in words such as door, flower, and harmony, whereas it is lost in RP; (2) t between vowels is voiced, so that metal and matter sound very much like British medal and madder, although the pronunciation of this t is softer and less aspirated, or breathy, than the d of British English.

Like Russian, English is a strongly stressed language. Four degrees of accentuation may be differentiated: primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak, which may be indicated, respectively, by acute (ґ), circumflex (€), and grave (?) accent marks and by the breve (ў). Thus, «Tкll mи the trъth» (the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) may be contrasted with «Tкll mй the trыth» (whatever you may tell other people); «blбck bоrd» (any bird black in colour) may be contrasted with «blбckbмrd» (that particular bird Turdus merula). The verbs permнt and recуrd (henceforth only primary stresses are marked) may be contrasted with their corresponding nouns pйrmit and rйcord. A feeling for antepenultimate (third syllable from the end) primary stress, revealed in such five-syllable words as equanнmity, longitъdinal, notorнety, opportъnity, parsimуnious, pertinбcity, and vegetбrian, causes stress to shift when extra syllables are added, as in histуrical, a derivativeof hнstory and theatricбlity, a derivative of theбtrical. Vowel qualities are also changed here and in such word groups as pйriod, periуdical, periodнcity; phуtograph, photуgraphy, photogrбphable. French stress may be sustained in many borrowed words; e.g., bizбrre, critнque, durйss, hotйl, prestнge, and technнque.

Pitch, or musical tone, determined chiefly by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords, may be level, falling, rising, or falling-rising. In counting one, two, three, four, one naturally gives level pitch to each of these cardinal numerals. But if people say I want two, not one, they naturally give two a falling tone and one a falling-rising tone. In the question One? rising pitch is used. Word tone is called accent, and sentence tone is referred to as intonation. The end-of-sentence cadence is important for expressing differences in meaning. Several end-of-sentence intonations are possible, but three are especially common: falling, rising, and falling-rising. Falling intonation is used in completed statements, direct commands, and sometimes in general questions unanswerable by yes or no (e.g., I have nothing to add; keep to the right; who told you that?). Rising intonation is frequently used in open-ended statements made with some reservation, in polite requests, and in particular questions answerable by yes or no (e.g., I have nothing more to say at the moment; let me know how you get on; are you sure?). The third type of end-of-sentence intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is used in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts (e.g., some people do like them [but others do not]; don't say I didn't warn you [because that is just what I'm now doing]). Intonation is on the whole less singsong in American than in British English, and there is a narrower range of pitch. Everywhere English is spoken, regional accents display distinctive patterns of intonation.

Morphology.

Most English nouns have plural inflection in (-e) s, but that form shows variations in pronunciation in the words cats (with a final s sound), dogs (with a final z sound), and horses (with a final iz sound), as also in the 3rd person singular present-tense forms of verbs: cuts (s), jogs (z), and forces (iz). Seven nouns have mutated (umlauted) plurals: man, men; woman, women; tooth, teeth; foot, feet; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice. Three have plurals in - en: ox, oxen; child, children; brother, brethren. Some remain unchanged (e.g., deer, sheep, moose, grouse). Five of the seven personal pronouns have distinctive forms for subject and object (e.g., he/him, she/her). Adjectives have distinctive endings for comparison (e.g., comparative bigger, superlative biggest), with several irregular forms (e.g., good, better, best).

The forms of verbs are not complex. Only the substantive verb (to be) has eight forms: be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Strong verbs have five forms: ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden. Regular or weak verbs customarily have four: walk, walks, walked, walking. Some that end in t or d have three forms only: cut, cuts, cutting.

In addition to the above inflections, English employs two other main morphological (structural) processes-affixation and composition-and two subsidiary ones-back-formation and blend.

2.2 Varieties of the English language

British English.

The abbreviation RP (Received Pronunciation) denotes what is traditionally considered the standard accent of people living in London and the southeast of England and of other people elsewhere who speak in this way. RP is the only British accent that has no specific geographical correlate: it is not possible, on hearing someone speak RP, to know which part of the United Kingdom he or she comes from. Though it is traditionally considered a «prestige» accent, RP is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English; it is itself only one particular accent that has, through the accidents of history, achieved a higher status than others. Although acquiring its unique standing without the aid of any established authority, it was fostered by the public schools (Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and so on) and the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Other varieties of English are well preserved in spite of the leveling influences of film, television, and radio. In several Northern accents, RP /a:/ (the first vowel sound in father) is still pronounced /ж/ (a sound like the a in fat) in words such as laugh, fast, and path; this pronunciation has been carried across the Atlantic into American English.

American and Canadian English.

The dialect regions of the United States are most clearly marked along the Atlantic littoral, where the earlier settlements were made. Three dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Each has its subdialects.

The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its six chief subdialects comprise northeastern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and eastern Vermont), southeastern New England (eastern Massachusetts, eastern Connecticut, and Rhode Island), southwestern New England (western Massachusetts and western Connecticut), the inland north (western Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson Valley, and metropolitan New York.

The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in New Jersey, to Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major subdialects comprise the Delaware Valley, the Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley, northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac and Shenandoah, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina and South Carolina, and eastern Tennessee.

The Southern dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to South Carolina. Its five chief subdialects comprise the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont, northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee valleys, and the South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.

These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, are highly tentative. To some extent these regions preserve the traditional speech of southeastern and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers to arrive in Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old words to new uses, but they were content to borrow names from the local Indian languages for unknown trees, such as hickory and persimmon and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoon and woodchuck. Later they took words from foreign settlers: chowder and prairie from the French, scow and sleigh from the Dutch. They made new compounds, such as backwoods and bullfrog, and gave new meanings to such words as lumber (which in British English denotes disused furniture, or junk) and corn (which in British English signifies any grain, especially wheat) to mean «maize.»

South Asian English.

In 1950 India became a federal republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, and Hindi was declared the first national language. English, it was stated, would «continue to be used for all official purposes until 1965.» In 1967, however, by the terms of the English Language Amendment Bill, English was proclaimed «an alternative official or associate language with Hindi until such time as all non-Hindi states had agreed to its being dropped.» English is therefore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the only practicable means of day-to-day communication between the central government at New Delhi and states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or «South,» where millions speak Dravidian (non-Indo-European) languages-Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. English is widely used in business, in higher education, and in scientific research.

In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic comprising two states, East and West. Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and West Pakistan, respectively, but English was adopted as a third official language and functioned as the medium of interstate communication. (In 1971 East Pakistan broke away from its western partner and became the independent state of Bangladesh.) English is also widely used in Sri Lanka and Nepal.

African English.

Africa is one of the world's most multilingual areas, if people are measured against languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly changing superstructure of world languages (Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese). The problems of language are everywhere linked with political, social, economic, and educational factors.

The Republic of South Africa, the oldest British settlement in the continent, resembles Canada in having two recognized European languages within its borders: English and Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders followed in the wake of 15th-century Portuguese explorers and have lived in widely varying war-and-peace relationships ever since. Although the Union of South Africa, comprising Cape Province, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free State, was for more than a half century (1910-61) a member of the British Empire and Commonwealth, its four prime ministers (Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, J.B.M. Hertzog, and Daniel F. Malan) were all Dutchmen. The Afrikaans language began to diverge seriously from European Dutch in the late 18th century and gradually came to be recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in South Africa differs in some respects from standard British English, its speakers do not regard the language as a separate one. They have naturally come to use many Afrikanerisms, such as kloof, kopje, krans, veld, and vlei, to denote features of the landscape and employ African names to designate local animals, plants, and social and political concepts. South Africa's 1996 constitution identified 11 official languages, English among them. The words trek and commando, notorious in South African history, are among several that have entered world standard English.

Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider communication. It functions as an official language of administration in, and is an official language of, numerous countries, all of them multilingual. Liberia is among the African countries with the deepest historical ties to English-the population most associated with the country's founding migrated from the United States during the 19th century-but English is just one of more than two dozen languages spoken there by multiple ethnic groups. English's place within that linguistic diversity is representative of English in Africa as a whole.

2.3 Similarities of the English language

Here is the list of major 10 languages that are similar to English. Let us have a look at them:

1. Scots - One Of The Languages Similar To English:

Scots is the closest language to English. The language is frequently regarded as a dialect of English. We can also state that English and Scots are very similar. That is because they both descended from Old English (Anglo-Saxon). Scots was the primary language of Scotland. From this point on, English has become the language of government and religion. It gradually supplanted everyday speech. There are also many mutually comprehensible dialects of Scots. In the same way, there are understandable dialects of English. Scots and English are very similar. A Modern English speaker will most likely understand a lot of Scots. Hello in Scottish Gaelic is Halт. Almost 2 million Scots people claimed to be fluent in the language. That is also according to the 2011 census of the United Kingdom. It means that Scots-speakers understand English better than English-speakers understand Scots.

2. Frisian:

Frisian is the answer. It is the secret brother of the English language. With an 80 percent lexical similarity, Frisian is English's closest living relative. They form the Anglo-Fresian branch of the West Germanic language family tree. It is along with German and Dutch. Let us talk about the pronunciation factor. In words like «sleep» or «sheep,» the Frisians have stuck to English phonetics. The Frisian «IE» sound is identical to the «II» sound, which, as previously stated, is similar to the English «EE».

When it comes to essential words, they are very similar. But they are very different when it comes to technical words. This language bears an uncanny resemblance to English. For example,

- English: We had a flood over the night.

- Frisian: Wy had in floed oer de nacht.

3. Dutch Is Among The Languages Similar To English:

The Dutch language is a member of the Indo-European language family's Germanic branch. It has the same origin as English. Between 90 and 93 percent of Dutch people claim to be able to hold an English conversation. This estimation is according to the research. But how similar is Dutch to English? In terms of pronunciation, Dutch and English are very similar. A few sounds in Dutch do not exist in English, but they are few and far between. The grammar of Dutch and English is also very similar. It is impossible to deny that they are two distinct languages. While looking at Dutch, one can conclude that it is a hybrid of English.

4. German:

If you can communicate in English, chances are you already know a few German words! The English language has borrowed many words from German. German and English using the same 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. It is one of the most obvious similarities. However, there are many words in both German and English that sound very similar. For example:

- `Haus» is the German word for `house.'

- `Universitдt» is the German word for `university.'

Moreover, English speakers will notice when learning German a similarity in grammatical rules. For example, the English word changes depending on the tense, from `drink, ' drank, and `drunk.' In German, you use the words `trinkt», `trank, ' and `trunken, ' and the same basic rule applies to most other verbs as well.

5. Norwegian:

Norwegian, or «Norsk,» is a Germanic language, making it easier to learn for English speakers. It has a large vocabulary in common with English. Unlike some Germanic languages, most Norwegian words are easy to pronounce. There are more words in Norwegian than you might think that are exactly the same in English. They are, of course, pronounced differently, but they are written and have the same meaning. Isn't it even better than cognates? Some of these are as follows:

- Problem as (pro-bleh-em)

- Bank as (bahnk)

Norwegian word order is similar to English. It follows the standard Subject Verb Object pattern. Even in longer sentences, it resembles English quite well.

6. French:

It is widely assumed that almost 10,000 words from French have been borrowed into English. According to this source, there are over 1,700 «true cognates» - words. These words look the same or similar and have the exact same meaning in both languages. In terms of similarities, English and French also share the same alphabet. They use similar grammatical structures at times. Also, share several words (or at least roots). For example,

- Kings and queens' names in England

- Name of families

- Pairs of synonyms

7. Swedish Is Among The Languages Similar To English:

These two languages also share a large number of cognates. Swedish also is one of the easiest languages for English speakers. Swedish has simple grammar rules and word order. It shares an extensive vocabulary. Moreover, they use the same Subject-Verb-Object pattern. It helps English speakers a lot. The language also has a similar syntax to English. Swedes have a relatively easy time learning English. The Swedish phonological system is like the English phonological system. Swedish has about 17 pure vowel sounds, slightly more than English. Verb patterns also follow the same rules.