Eli5: Why is the English language most common in this world?
In: 41
The British empire, the BBC, worldwide English language television, English speaking countries (European countries are English speaking countries as a second language) won the big war, English speaking people invented airplanes and the internet, both mediums that are primarily English.
That is the lion’s share of it, but English is also well suited to be a second language. Because English’ grammar is simple compared to basically anything but Mandarin, you can form reasonable English sentences with foreign words and have it make sense. All of the primary functions of grammar, as far as understanding what the words do (where is the verb, what is the subject, and if you can’t figure a way to do the tense just say it) it is implied by the structure of the sentence. A little more detail on that, say I want to say that I went running yesterday but I don’t know the morphology required to make that proper English, you can contextualize it with other words and you will be understood. “I am running, yesterday, and someone yells at me.” That is enough for me to understand that you **were** **running,** yesterday ,and someone **yelled** at you. You don’t need to know a lot of English to communicate with English speaking people.
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