In the modern world, English is one of the most common. Of course, officially it has the same status as everyone else, but de facto English is often used as the language of international communication. Fortunately, it is quite simple to master them at the conversational level, although it will take a lot of time to study it to perfection.
Approximately 1/7 of the world’s population speaks English. This is about a billion people. By prevalence in the world, he ranks second, second only to Chinese. English is followed by Hindi and Spanish. It has the status of a state in 58 countries, which is more than in the case of any other language. Moreover, in half of these countries, almost no one speaks English. Different English-speaking countries have very different dialects. In the United States alone, there are 24 of them, not to mention other states. In the southern United States and northern Mexico, a bizarre Spanglish dialect spread, a mixture of English and Spanish. The books of the English writer Joanne Rowling about Harry Potter for the American market were “translated” from British English to American.
Every English-speaking country has its own slang, often incomprehensible to English speakers from other countries. The most frequently used letter in English is E, and the least frequent is Q. The symbol & was once the official part of the English alphabet. Ancient English differs from modern English in approximately the same degree as Old Russian from Russian. Many English words have a huge list of possible meanings. The most “multi-valued word” is set. Depending on the conditions of use, it can mean several hundred different concepts, objects or actions.
The longest sentence ever written in English consists of almost 14 thousand words. You can find him in The Rotter’s Club’s work by writer Jonathan Coe. Ancient Germans were brought to the UK from the mainland by the Germans who invaded the islands after the Romans left them. Until the 15th century, punctuation marks were not used in English. There are more words in English than in any other language of the world – more than 800 thousand. And it is replenished with new words, it is also the fastest of all the others – on average, one new English word appears every 100 minutes.
The English word “drunk” (drunk) is included in the Guinness Book of Records as a word with the maximum number of synonyms – there are 2241 of them. The vast majority of texts written in English use vocabulary of no more than 1000 words. In addition to the previous fact, there are more synonyms in English than in any other. On average, the word “happy” is found in English texts three times more often than “sad”.
