Welcome to Words on Words
Words
For some people words are just a means to an end: something we need in order to communicate our thoughts and to understand the thoughts of others, but for a few people, words are a source of enjoyment and wonder in themselves -- objects to be held up to view or taken apart or rolled around the mouth.
There are many delights to be found in words (their shape, their cultural connotations, or their history) and people often find that their enjoyment increases as they learn more about the history and structure of words.
You are welcome to put any questions you may have about words or language to Dr. Eek, our resident linguist. And, of course, you can add your own responses to queries. Enjoy! (Can you use enjoy intransitively without mental quotation marks?)
English as a World Language
English is the second or third most popular world language, as measured by the number of native speakers, which was around 402 million in 2002. It is also the most popular second language in the world, as the cultural, economic, military, political and scientific importance of the United States of America and the United Kingdom for the last two centuries has given English pre-eminent status as a language of international communication. With such a wide geographical distribution and because of its use in academia and other specialized contexts, numerous distinct varieties and special jargons have emerged.
English is the first language of a large majority of the population in the United States of America, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (including England, Scotland and Wales), Ireland (Eire), Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Guyana, Jamaica, Antigua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Trinidad and Tobago. There are also significant numbers of native speakers in South Africa, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
English is also one of the primary languages of Belize (with Spanish), Cameroon (with French and African languages), Dominica, St. Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (with French Creole), the Federated States of Micronesia, and Liberia (with African languages).
It is an official language, but not native to large segments of the population, in Fiji, Ghana, Gambia, Kiribati, Lesotho, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is the most commonly used unofficial language of Israel and an increasing number of other countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany.
English is also the language most often studied as a foreign language in Europe (32.6%) and Japan, followed by French, German and Spanish.
Because of the history and sheer number of people who use English, there are many different varieties of English. A variety can be thought of as a distinctive kind of English, or more technically, a specific linguistic system shared by a particular pool of users. There are no sharp dividing lines between varieties, since people typically master more than one variety. Nevertheless, varieties can be described in terms of the group who most uses a particular variety and the linguistic properties of that variety. Varieties can be identified in this way by geographical groups, social groups, or particular stylistic or usage types.A dialect is a variety of a language spoken in a certain geographical area. Because of the wide distribution of English speakers, a number of distinct dialects have emerged over the course of history. These include American English, Australian English, British English, Canadian English, South African English, Caribbean English, Indian English, Jamaican English, Liberian English, New Zealand English, Pakistani English, and Singapore English among others.