If you speak English, you have plenty

of people to talk to.

People use the English language to
communicate in the United States,
Canada, the United Kingdom,
Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa, and other countries.
It is spoken in more parts of the
world than any other language.
English is one of the great thieves.
It is constantly borrowing. It started out taking words from Latin,
Greek, French, and German.
Then English went on to borrow words from more than 50 different
languages.
From Spanish and Portuguese, it borrowed the words alligator,
canyon, and sombrero.
 From Native Americans, it got raccoon and wigwam.
 Peru contributed llama and quinine.
From Italian, it took cameo, stanza, and violin, for example.
 The Caribbean islands gave English barbecue and cannibal.
 From Africa came chimpanzee and zebra,
 From India came bandanna, curry, and punch,
 From Australia came kangaroo and boomerang.
Science caused an explosion in words. Some
words in science combine parts of Greek
and Latin words.
They include penicillin, stethoscope, and
supersonic.
Others were borrowed from languages
spoken today.
Robot comes from a Czech word.
The English language has been stealing
words for more than 1,500 years.
The most complete dictionary of the
English language contains a whopping
600,000 words.
Onomatopoeia (pronounced AHN-uh-MAH-tuh-PEE-uh) is the
creation of words that imitate natural sounds, words such as
burp and clink.
Another way to get new words is adding prefixes and suffixes.
Prefixes, such as mis- or ex-, go onto the front of words and
create misread, ex-boyfriend, and other words.
Suffixes, such as -ness or –ist, attach to the end of words.
Separate words can form compound words, such as bonehead
and downpour.
Words can collapse into each other, such as brunch, from
breakfast and lunch.
It’s common for new words to grow from previously existing
words—for example, to burgle, formed from burglar.
The use of words can change. Shower started out meaning
“light rain.” It later referred to a bathroom shower, and then
became used as a verb, to shower.
English is said to have one of the most difficult spelling
systems in the world. Take a look at these four words:

anxious, fission, fuchsia, and ocean.

They all spell the sh sound differently. English has 14

different spellings for the sh sound.
Throughout history, the spelling of English words hasn’t
changed as much as their sounds have.

For example, people once pronounced the k in knife and the

gh in right. We no longer say those letters, but we’ve kept
the old spelling. English also tends to hold on to the spelling
of words it borrows from other languages.
The weirdest examples of differences between spelling
and pronunciation in English are the six different
pronunciations of ough. Say these words aloud:

bough, cough, thorough, thought, through, and rough.

Some spellings have lasted from a time when the gh was

pronounced in English.

The English language is unusual in the way it borrows and

grows. New words are constantly being introduced.

The verb to google is a new word that means “to do a fast

Internet search.” It comes from the widely used Internet
search engine, Google.
To talk with the most people in the world, you need to know
Chinese. It is the world’s most widely spoken language.

More than 1.2 billion people speak Chinese.

Arabic is second and then Hindi
 English in fourth place.

Other languages in the top ten are Spanish, Bengali,

Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and German.

Every language has different words for things. Why is the

four-legged animal that barks called a dog in English? There’s
no reason for it. It’s just an accepted custom among speakers
of English. In Spanish dog is perro, and it is sobaka in Russian
and inu in Japanese.
Spoken language is made of sounds.
Letters in the alphabet represent these sounds.
The sounds usually don’t have meaning by
themselves. But they can be combined with other
sounds to create words that do have meaning.
The letters p, e, and n do not in themselves mean
much, but their combination as pen means something
you write with.
Words get combined into more complicated
constructions, called phrases. Then phrases get
combined to make sentences. The proper ordering of
words in sentences is called syntax.
All human languages have a structure. We
call this structure grammar.
“I went shopping today and bought a new
coat” is a clear sentence.
Its grammar is correct.
But “I shopping today go coat new have
bought” sounds wrong and is hard to
understand.
That’s because the grammar is incorrect.
Talking is more complicated than you might think.

Try making the sounds l, p, m, t, s, th, f, and v.

Air comes out of your lungs and moves through your mouth.
 Notice how your tongue and lips move.
You use your teeth to make the sound th, as in “this.”
 Some sounds, like f, come from the front of your mouth.
 The sound v comes from way back in your throat.

Imagine how many different movements you make with your

mouth every time you say just one sentence!
The first language you learn to speak is called your
native language. As a baby, you listened to your
parents or other people speaking and then imitated
the sounds you heard. Babies seem to be born with an
ability to learn the language they hear.

Native speakers learn as children to use the right

words and arrange them in the right order without
even thinking about it. If English is your native
language, you know automatically that “I going bed” is
wrong, but “I am going to bed” is right.
If you learn a second language, you have to memorize
its words and learn its rules.
That’s why learning a second language can be difficult.
Young children can learn a new language very easily. If
they are surrounded by people speaking a different
language, they soon learn to speak it as well as their
native language.
But as people grow older, it becomes more difficult to
learn new languages.
People gradually lose the ability to learn the grammar
and pronounce the sounds of another language.
People who learn a new language as adults usually have
a “foreign accent” when they speak it.
 What is. . .

 Sentence Mastery
reflects the ability to understand, recall and produce English
phrases and clauses in meaningful sentence structures.
 Vocabulary
reflects the ability to understand common everyday words spoken
in sentence context and to produce such words as needed.
 Fluency
reflects the rhythm, phrasing and timing evident in constructing,
reading and repeating sentences. Speaker has good rhythm,
phrasing and over-all timing. Speech is generally smooth with few
if any hesitations, omissions, or repetitions.
 Pronunciation
reflects the ability to produce consonants, vowels and stress in a
native-like manner in sentence context.