Question

Nobody knows what the first language was. But scientists feel sure that nobody speaks it today because all languages change and keep on changing as long as people use them. One language may change in different ways in different places and grow into several languages.

If we could meet the people who spoke English five hundred years ago, we probably couldn′t understand much what they said.

English itself is a mixture of several languages. Scientists believe that these languages and many others all grew out of the same language which they call Indo-European. Nobody speaks it now. But some of its descendants are Latin, German, English, French, Greek, Russian and many of the different languages spoken in India.

Britain and America were once described as nations divided by a common language. Just what is difference between the English spoken in Britain and America?

The first English settlers to reach America arrived in Virginia in 1607 and in Massachusetts in 1620. They all spoke English of the early seventeenth century – the language of Shakespeare and Milton. Most of them came originally from the south and south-east of England. Although some of them had spent some years of exile in Holland they spoke with the accents of the southern part of their home country. To a large extent they kept that form of speech, but they soon learned to give old words new uses. They also took words from the local Indian languages for plants and animals that were new to them.

Until the Declaration of Independence in 1776 over two-thirds of the settlers in what later became the U.S. came from England. After that date many other people came to make a new life for themselves in the New World. These included Irish, French, Germans, Dutch, Italians, Slavs, and Scandinavians. All these people gave new words to the language of North America. The Negroes who had been taken from Africa as slaves to work on the rice and cotton plantations added words and structures from their own native languages. Some people today think that the very American expression O.K. comes from a similar expression which was brought to America by the Negroes.

All these people contributed in various ways to the language which was to become American English. Most civilizations and cultures – in their writings, traditions, folk stories – have traces of the old language.

1. Answer the questions in full sentences:

1. What do they call the language of the 17th centure?

2. How can we describe English language?

3. Can you say that English and Russian are somehow similar? Why?

4. How did modern English appear?

5. So what is the difference in British and American English?

2. Find out how these words are related to the text and write it down:

1. Slaves –

2. Milton -

3. Descendants –

4. Settlers -

5. New World -​