Talk:English language

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• Non-native English reading by Spanish native speaker 001.ogg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 19:36, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

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Remove United States from the list of countries where English is dominant without being legally defined, as Executive Order 14224 made English the official national language. ~2025-38158-22 (talk) 00:49, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Not done for now. There has never been a law that has actually been passed declaring English the official language. I would either wait for that to be passed, or establish a consensus. NotJamestack (✉️|📝) 01:00, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

The legality around executive orders is somewhat complicated. They have the force of law, but like any law, including those enacted by Congress, they're subject to judicial review. Normally they only affect the functioning of the federal executive branch, but Congress also affirmatively delegates the executive certain powers beyond what the constitution strictly states for the executive branch ostensibly to make the federal bureaucracy more agile and topic-adept than it otherwise would be. The OP isn't wrong. Absent an adverse final ruling by the judiciary, an executive order stands as law as written. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/executive_order

In short, @NotJamestack you're incorrect that executive orders aren't law. ~2026-73723-4 (talk) 00:44, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Would've been helpful to have that source earlier... NotJamestack (✉️|📝) 01:44, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

There are two unclear statements regarding the area of ​​distribution of the dialects from which Old English developed. The first statement restricts it to Frisia, the second extends it to Lower Saxony and Southern Jutland as well.

"Old English was one of several Ingvaeonic languages, which emerged from a dialect continuum spoken by West Germanic peoples during the 5th century in Frisia, on the coast of the North Sea."

"Old English developed from a set of West Germanic dialects, sometimes identified as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic, that were originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony and southern Jutland by Germanic peoples known to the historical record as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes."

It may need to be adjusted, but I'm not familiar with this topic. ~2025-40420-16 (talk) 18:38, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

I have found a strange quirk in the map of regions where English is the majority and/or official language, specifically with the labels for the colour codes. Viewing the article in my web browser (Brave 1.85.116 on MacOS 15.7.2), it appears correctly. However, viewing it in Apple’s Dictionary.app (2.3.0, on the same Mac), the colours are swapped. I am baffled. LincMad (talk) 19:53, 14 December 2025 (UTC)

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Please replace the URL from reference 11 in the lede to this one: https://archive.org/details/englishonetongue0000svar_y3z3

the reason being that the current url is dead. Thanks ~2025-38360-06 (talk) 11:54, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

 Done jolielover♥talk 14:03, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Publicmember. I saw that you asked for reasoning before reverting your edit, so I wanted to bring the discussion here. Edit descriptions are maybe too short for the discussion you want to have.

You made an edit linked here where you added this to the lead: "which contrarily to all other Germanic Languages including German, Swiss-German Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Dutch which were created using a Germanic Alphabet, English was created from the Latin alphabet along with the Romanesque Languages of French, Portuguese and Italian". First off, this has nothing in the article's main body which backs it up. See MOS:LEAD to learn more about what lead sections should do, but in particular it says "Apart from basic facts, significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article."

Secondly, I simply want to know more about what you're trying to say. What do you mean about the language being created with an alphabet? This is a strange thing to say, given that languages largely exist independently of the alphabet. Furthermore, English has been documented as using runes before the Latin alphabet, and all the other languages you mentioned use the Latin alphabet today. Is there some other distinction you're making? And what makes it important enough to put in the lead? IndigoManedWolf (talk) 01:16, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

Good point. This turns the reality of language evolution on its ear: all other Germanic Languages including German, Swiss-German Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Dutch which were created using a Germanic Alphabet, English was created from the Latin alphabet along with the Romanesque Languages of French, Portuguese and Italian. Aside from Finnish not being in any way Germanic except for lexical borrowings... none of these languages nor the many others that could be mentioned in their geographic areas were created using or created from alphabets, whatever that may mean; they evolved over time in speech communities. When a few ventured to write them, they used and to varying degrees adapted the system they were accustomed to (e.g. Cyrillic for Romanian). The leaps in the lead from actual language to written representation are jarring enough without introducing, for the languages cited, counterfactual notions of language evolution. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 23:43, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

not in English ? Do not understand ! ~2026-86339-0 (talk) 18:23, 8 February 2026 (UTC)