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The Characteristic of English Language

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The Characteristics of English Language Among the different languages of the world, English is the most widely spoken and written languages of the world. Today, English occupies the prestigious place of an International language. It is utilized by the largest number of the people of many nations in all the five continents in the world. The reason, which comes to our notice is that, it is not due to the qualities of its own but there are important historical, political and economical reasons for its worldwide popularity. The other obvious reason is that English speaking nations, like England and America have made it prominent. However, no language can become so important, unless it has some outstanding and special characteristics for its phenomenal growth and popularity. The main characteristics for this stride of English language are as under:

* Receptiveness * Heterogeneousness * Simplicity of Inflexion * Fixed Word Order * Use of Periphrasis * Growth of Intonation. * Receptiveness The first outstanding characteristic of English language is receptiveness. This is regarded as extra-ordinary feature of the language. It has accepted and adopted words from Asian, European, African, Indian, Japanese, Chinese and other languages. English has kept open-door policy of accepting words from classical languages like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. * Heterogeneousness Heterogeneousness means mixed form or the lack of purity. English language contains words from so many other languages that it has become the most mixed language. Original words from other languages have crept into English. Some words have retained their original meanings and some words have changed their meanings. The spellings and pronunciations have also changed. E.g. the word ‘Tur’ from French has become ‘Tower’ in modern English. *

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