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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 fibMost countries have an official language by law, but not the U.S. While 90% of Americans speak English, an estimated 350 languages are spoken within U.S. borders. There have been federal attempts to make English official, but none of them have stuck.
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.
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The last word in the Oxford English Dictionary is ______, a genus of South American weevil.
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The last word in the Oxford English Dictionary is zyzzyva, a genus of South American weevil.
English has 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 twice as many non-native speakers (753 million) as native ones (379 million). When factoring in both of these numbers, English has (just barely) more speakers than Mandarin, which has 918 million native speakers — by far the most in the world — but only 199 million non-native speakers. In total, English is spoken by 1.5 billion speakers around the world, compared to Mandarin’s 1.1 billion.
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