Have you ever wondered why English looks and sounds the way it does? Why its pronunciation cannot be predicted by its spelling? Why it seems to have so many words found in other languages like Spanish, German and French? Why is it just plain “weird?” The answer lies in understanding that English has always been, at its core, a contact language.

From the dark ages in what is today known as Britain, English began to develop and shapeshift thanks to the encounters among the different inhabitants (and invaders) of the islands: the Celt tribes who occupied the territory, the Roman engineers who brought Latin governance and urban culture, the Anglo-Saxons who ushered in Old English based on their Germanic dialects, the Vikings who simplified linguistic matters with their lexicon and morphology, and the Norman elites who added a touch of French flair to government communication and literary works. 

All these bloodlines coming into contact explains why English looks and sounds a bit “weird” and behaves somewhat unpredictably. Many of its spellings are a legacy of older pronunciations (e.g. the silent ‘k’ in knight) and its vocabulary is a mixed bag of borrowed items from other languages (e.g. words like entrepreneur, mosquito, kindergarten, cake and knife, to name a few). These so-called oddities are the result of grammatical adaptation and simplification.

In the School of Pedagogy of National and Foreign Languages at UDA, we study English as a dynamic, global contact language, whether through English as a Foreign Language (ELF) or as a Lingua Franca (ELF), to understand how English is not really owned by one person or nation; instead, it truly belongs to everyone, “weirdness” and all.