When did English become a language and not a nationality ?

Question

Please see my previous question for clarification

if english is just a language then what is scottish, welsh and irish ?

Answer 1

The original people who spoke english, were from england. It became wide spread years later after people started migrating to other parts of the world and enforcing their language on others.

Answer 2

It is both. English is the language of England, where the English people live. Welsh, Scottish and Irish are also language, and also used to designate the nationalities of the people who speak them.

Answer 3

Well, English has been a language for well over 500 years, and much before that I'm sure. Some of the ones you named are dialects of English, and some have their own actual language, but that language is being slowly killed off as more and more people in the British Isles speak English as the primary language, and there is less need for Scottish, or Welsh or Irish as a dialect or language. Some of their language has worked their way into the English language, just as English as worked its way into other languages such as Japanese

Answer 4

Because someone who is English, along with someone who is Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish is a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland making their Nationality "British"
English describes a language, as does Welsh, Scots has largely fallen into disuse but Gaelic is still used in Ireland and parts of Scotland.

Answer 5

English has been a language for some considerable time. However, the time at which it stopped being a nationality for the purposes of international affairs was when it stopped being an independent sovereign state, which was 1 May 1707, when the nations of England and Scotland joined together to form the United Kingdom.

It is of course still a nationality from the point of view of denoting someone who comes from England, which remains a country, albeit not one which is independent. It is clearly not "just" a language.

Answer 6

When did French, Italian, German, Danish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc become a language?

And it's English and not Scottish or Welsh because of the English Empire. If the Scotts had ruled the world, we'd be calling it Scottish today. It's all history my friend.

Answer 7

As the name says it, the United Kingdom of Great Britain is composed of different regions, each of them with strong "nationalistic" pride. One person may first identify himself as Welsh, Scotish before saying he is a Britisher. English is usually a person born in the center of the British Isle, with the capital in London. Each region has a specific language as well, although the speakers of Welsh for example are fewer now than they used to be. The easiest way to identify if a person is Scotish, Welsh or Irish is through the accent they have when they speak English. So apart from being a specific language, Scotish, Welsh, Irish may identify the accents as well as regional belonging to the North, East or South of Great Britian.

Answer 8

As soon as the English king spoke.
It became known as the King's English.
English as we know it, is the butchered version.
Some people from England speak Welsh. That is another broken form of the King's English that began in Wales.

It's sort of like when a person speaks Spanish. It does not necessarily mean that the person came from Spain. They just speak the language of the Spainiards. Some people make the mistake of calling a Mexican citizen, Spanish, Cuban citzens, Spanish, etc. They are referring to the language they speak. Not their nationality.

The proper term in that case, is Hispanic.

Answer 9

England IS a nation, and English IS a nationality, as well as a language. The English language grew out of the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons, and with an infusion of Latin and Norman, helped by Pax Britannica, British Empire etc, it eventually blossomed into the global language it is today.

From the Oxford English Dictionary -
( http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/nationality ) -

"nationality

• noun (pl. nationalities) 1 the status of belonging to a particular nation. 2 an ethnic group forming a part of one or more political nations."

The Anglo-Saxons were speaking English long before they were aware that they were in England.

Answer 10

An estimated 300-400 million people speak English as their first language. One recent estimate is that 1.9 billion people, nearly a third of the world's population, have a basic proficiency in English [1]. English is the dominant international language in communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, diplomacy and the internet. It has been one of the official languages of the United Nations since its founding in 1945.