Original photo by Aaron Burden/ Unsplash
English words today come from a variety of languages, originating from Greek, French, Latin, and many others. But perhaps the most important of them all is German, whose words form the backbone of English. That’s why English is considered a Germanic language, as opposed to a Romance language like French (although English also shares a considerable number of similarities with French, thanks to the Normans). Taking a look at the most commonly written words in English around the world, as compiled by the Oxford English Dictionary, illustrates German’s indelible influence.
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It's a fibThe U.N. has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Document are typically issued in all six languages, and each has its own “Language Day” at the United Nations to promote multilingualism.
At the top of the list of the most common written words is, unsurprisingly, “the,” related to German’s gendered der, die, and das. Germanic function words, such as “and,” “but,” and “that,” pepper the rest of the list. English’s most-written noun (“time”), verb (“be”), and adjective (“good”) are also Germanic in origin. Today, English borrows liberally for its vocabulary — scholars estimate that words from more than 350 languages have entered English — but the roots of its linguistic tree are considered Western Germanic. English speakers are far from alone: Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian (spoken in parts of the Netherlands and Germany), Yiddish, and of course German also developed from the same West Germanic roots. In total, these tongues are spoken as primary languages by about 450 million people throughout the world.
Numbers Don't Lie
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The last word in the Oxford English Dictionary is ______, a genus of South American weevil.
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English has more than twice as many non-native speakers as native ones.
English is one of the most universal languages in human history, thanks to the former expanse of the British empire, the dominance of the U.S. post-World War II, and other factors. It’s because of this ubiquity that it has the strange distinction of having more than twice as many non-native speakers (1.1 billion) as native ones (380 million). When factoring in both of these numbers, English has (just barely) more speakers than Mandarin, which has 929 million native speakers — by far the most in the world — but only 198 million non-native speakers. In total, English is spoken by 1.5 billion speakers around the world, compared to Mandarin’s 1.1 billion.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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