English - a Language of the World
Language belongs to each of us. Everyone uses words. What is in about language that makes people so curious? The answer is that there is almost nothing in our lives that is not touched by language. We live in and by language. We all speak and we all listen: so we are all interested in the origin of words, in how they appear and die.
The rise of English is a story of wonderful success. When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English did not exist. Five hundred years later, in the 5th century, English was already spoken by the people who inhabited Great Britain but they were not many, but their English was not the language we know today. Nearly a thousand years later, at the end of the 16th century, when William Shakespeare created his works, English was the native language of about 6 million Englishmen. At that time English was not used anywhere else except Great Britain.
Nowadays, four hundred years later, 750 million people all over the world use English, and half of those speak it as a mother tongue. English is more widely spoken and written, than any other language has ever been. It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language. English is the main language of business. It is the language of sports: the official language of the Olympics.
The English language surrounds us like a sea, and like the waters of a deep sea it is full of mysteries. English is and has always been constantly changing. Some words die, some change their meanings and all the time new words appear in the language.