The English language.
The Origins of English.
The English language belongs to the Indio-European family of languages (sometimes called Aryan, or Indo-Germanic), which also includes Sanskrit (the classical language of India) and the various languages derived from it (Prakrit, Pali, Hindustani, etc), Old and Modern Persian, Classical and Modern Greek, Latin and its descendants (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian), Old Celtic (whit its modern derivations: Irish Erse, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh Cymric), Old Slavonic (from which Russian, Serbian, Polish, Czech and Bulgarian are derived), Baltic (including Lithuanian and Lettish), Albanian and other languages.
English is one of the tongues included in the Germanic group of Indo-European, together with Gothic (which represents East Germanic), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic (which are the North Germanic or Scandinavian tongues), and the languages of the West Germanic group: Old High German (which has developed into Modern German) and Low German (from which derive Old Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, and English itself).
English is spoken today as first language by nearly 304 million people (of which 233 in America and 58 in Europe), and is the language with the greatest international diffusion throughout the world.
