West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related
 to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and is
 now widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States,
 the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island
 nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of
 India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.

 Origins and basic characteristics

 English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to
 most other languages spoken in Europe and 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, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish), and West (German, Netherlandic
 [Dutch and Flemish], Frisian, 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.

 Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European,
 the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German,
 French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of
 years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms
 found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in
 Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and Chinese words for "man" are exemplary.
 German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. Chinese has one
 form: jen. English stands in between, with four forms: man, man's, men, men's. In
 English only nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. Adjectives have no inflections
 aside from the determiners "this, these" and "that, those." (The endings -er, -est,
 denoting degrees of comparison, are better regarded as noninflectional suffixes.)
 English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., "the tall
 man," "the tall woman," compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for
 verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in
 Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has only five forms
 (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern
 German reiten has 16 forms.

 In addition to this simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics:
 flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.

 Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the
 loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in
 their forms are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example,
 of "planning a table" or "tabling a plan," "booking a place" or "placing a book," "lifting
 a thumb" or "thumbing a lift." In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare
 exceptions in Scandinavian, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the
 necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional
 pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs
 as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in English of
 the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er to the place-name
 and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In
 French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two
 prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a
 plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in "wages board" and "sports editor"; or even a
 conjunctional group, as in "prices and incomes policy" and "parks and gardens
 committee."

 Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages
 and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change)
 or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to
 denote some new process. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms
 scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements.

 English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the
 pronunciation of words; this is discussed below in the section Orthography.
 

www.britannica.com