11. English and English speaking countries - P

LINGUA FRANCA - it is a term for common language spoken by two people who do not have the same home language

AMERICAN ENGLISH

American English has more native speakers than any others form of English. American E. is flexible, ever - changing language. It has taken many words from the other languages spoken by the early American settlers such as Dutch, German, French and Spanish. When the first English speakers arrived in America they met native Americans who spoke many different languages and dialects. European trappers and traders learned words from the natives so they could do business with them. Some animals names are of native American origin: skunk, moose, chipmunk. The natives worked as guides to lead the Europeans through areas of land completely unknown for settlers. In this way, they learned many of the native place names. Movie English - a lot of people outside US first get to know American English through movies. The word movie is today uniquely American. Advertising has been responsible for some unusual spelling such as: night->nite; light->lite. Noah Webster is most famos of all american dictionary-makers, supported idea of eliminating letters in words that were not pronunced in a word. British E. X American E. honour X honor centre X center travelled X traveled film X movie Have you got a pen please? X Do you have a pen?

My attitude to English

I really like English and I enjoy speaking English. I like that you are not limited when you can speak English well. So you can travel or live all around the world. From my own experience English is the easiest language to learn, after Slovak of course. I try to speak English a lot and I have many American friends as well. I also recently realized how much Czech language is difficult. My dream is to visit the USA and maybe to live there for a while. This is one reason why I want to be good at speaking English. The next reason is my future, because I know that I will definitely need English in my future job. I think that all people should learn English. It is a World Language and in the future no one will manage without it.

GLOBAL LANGUAGE

So English language isn't only in England and in America, but in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and in others countries too. Nowadays, there are about 800 000 words in the English language and some 775 milion use English as their first or second language. It is the second widely spoken language after Chinese, an official language in over 70 countries and the official world language in medicine, science, music, media, technology, tourism, business etc. About 80% (percent) of English words come from other languages and the most common letter is the letter E. To save time and as fashion, many people started to use shorter and shorter words and icons like L for expressing their mood. For example ASAP is shortcut for ,,as soon as possible’’ and XOXO means hugs and kisses. Learning a foreign language, chiefly English, is really important as language is a means of communication and without it our lives would be very difficult. So I’m very glad that I enjoy English language