English belongs to Indo-European-Germanic-West Germanic branch. In terms of the number of native English speakers, English is the official language of the most used countries, the most widely used first language in the world, and the official language of the European Union and many international organizations and Commonwealth countries. The number of native English speakers ranks third in the world, second only to Chinese and Spanish native speakers.

English evolved from the language spoken by the white people of Anglo-Saxon and jute tribes who immigrated to the British Isles from Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands and surrounding areas, and spread to all parts of the world through active British colonization. Due to contact with many national languages in history, vocabulary has changed from unitary to pluralistic, grammar has changed from "more inflections" to "less inflections", and pronunciation has changed regularly.

19 From the 20th century, the leading position of Britain and America in world culture, economy, military affairs, politics and science made English an international language. Nowadays, English is used as a medium of communication in many international situations. English is also the language most closely related to computers. Most programming languages are related to English. With the use of the Internet, English is more widely used. English is one of the working languages of the United Nations. Some people think Scottish is the closest independent language to English, while others think it is a dialect of English. The closest thing to old English is ancient Frisian, which is still used in northern Germany and Frisian province in the Netherlands. Scottish, low Saxon, Danish, German, Dutch, Afrikaans and English are also very close. The French normans with bloodline conquered the kingdom of England in the 1 1 century, bringing tens of thousands of French and Latin words, which greatly enriched the English vocabulary and led to the invalidation of many original words.