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English linguistic data
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Common questions about English
What linguistic data does this English page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with English's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the English data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
Does English have grammatical gender or case?
No grammatical gender on nouns, adjectives, or articles — the only gendered remnants are pronouns (he/she/it). Case has collapsed everywhere except pronouns: nominative I/he/she/we/they versus accusative me/him/her/us/them, plus possessive 's on nouns. Old English had a four-case system on every noun; Modern English keeps almost none of it.
How many speakers does English have?
Around 1.1 billion total speakers, with about 370 million speaking it as a first language. The bulk of growth is L2: English is the dominant lingua franca for science, aviation, international business, and the internet, so total speakers vastly outstrip native counts.
Why does the similarity score between English and Dutch or German come out so high?
All three are West Germanic, share core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic, and align on most phonological features (stress timing, voicing contrast in stops). English diverged further on word order rigidity and case loss, but genetic and typological factors weigh heavily. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for English
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-43146-0.
- Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. ISBN 0-582-51734-6.
- Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman. ISBN 0-582-23725-4.
- Carter, R. & McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58846-1.
- Swan, M. (2016). Practical English Usage. 4th ed. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-420243-5.