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Concept
Foreign-language influences in English
Summary
The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. Around 70 percent of words in any text derive from Old English.
The influence of other languages on English is mostly through loanwords. English borrowed many words from Old Norse, the North Germanic language of the Vikings, and later from Norman French, the Romance language of the Normans, which descends from Latin. Estimates of native words derived from Old English range up to 33%, with the rest made up of outside borrowings. These are mostly from Norman/French, but many others were later borrowed directly from Latin or Greek. Some of the Romance words borrowed into English were themselves loanwords from other languages, such as the Germanic Frankish language.
While some new words enter English as slang, most do not. Some words are adopted from other languages; some are mixtures of existing words (portmanteau words), and some are new creations made of roots from dead languages.
A computerized survey of about 80,000 words in the third edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, published by Finkenstaedt and Wolff in 1973 estimated the origin of English words to be as follows:
French: 28.30%;
Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%;
Germanic languages, as inherited from Old English, from Proto-Germanic, or a more recent borrowing from a Germanic language such as Old Norse, excluding Germanic words borrowed from a Romance language: 25%;
Greek: 5.32%;
no etymology given: 4.04%;
derived from proper names: 3.28%; and
all other languages: less than 1%.
A 1975 survey of 10,000 words taken from several thousand business letters by Joseph M. Williams suggested this set of statistics:
French (langue d'oïl): 41%;
"Native" English (derived from Old English): 33%;
Latin: 15%;
Old Norse: 5%;
Dutch: 1%; and
Other: 5%.
Here is a list of the most common foreign language influences in English, where other languages have influenced or contributed words to English.
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