Late Modern English(1800-Present)

• The pronunciation, grammar, and spelling of Late-Modern English are essentially the same as Early-Modern English, but Late-Modern English has significantly more words due to several factors.

• First, discoveries during the scientific and industrial revolutions created a need for a new vocabulary.

• Scholars drew on Latin and Greek words to create new words such as “oxygen,” “nuclear,” and “protein.”

• Scientific and technological discoveries are still ongoing and neologisms continue to this day, especially in the field of electronics and computers.

• Just as the printing press revolutionized both spoken and written English, the new language of technology and the Internet places English in a transition period between Modern and Postmodern.

• Second, the English language has always been a colonizing force.

• During the medieval and early modern periods, the influence of English quickly spread throughout Britain, and from the beginning of the seventeenth century on, English began to spread throughout the world.

• Significantly, one of England’s colonies, America, created what is known as American English and, in some respects, American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than the modern Standard British English(or the modern Queen’s English)

because many Americanisms are originally British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost at home (e.g., “trash” for “rubbish”).

Global English

• Recently, English has become a lingua franca, a global language that is regularly used and understood by many countries where English is not the first/native language.

In fact, when Pope John Paul II went to the Middle East to retrace Christ’s footsteps and addressed Christians, Muslims, and Jews, the Pope didn’t speak Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, or his native Polish; instead, he spoke in English.

In fact, English is used in over 90 countries, and it is the working language of the Asian trade group ASEAN

( Association of Southeast Asian Nation) and of 98 percent of international research physicists and chemists.

• It is also the language of computing, international communication, diplomacy, and navigation.

• Over one billion people worldwide are currently learning English, making it unarguably a global language.

• According to the Ethnologue, there are over 508 million speakers of English as a first or second language as of 1999, a number dwarfed only by the Chinese language in terms of the number of speakers.

• However, Chinese has a smaller geographical range and is spoken primarily in mainland China and Taiwan and also by a sizable immigrant community in North America.

• In contrast, English is spoken in a vast number of territories including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Southern Africa,...etc.