English language

Many years ago in southern Russia lived a tribe(kmen) of people whose language is known as Indo-European. This language is now extinct(vyhaslý),but it was the ancestor(předek) of many modern languages which are spoken in every continent of the world today. This all modern languages create the Indo-European family. It has nine branches: Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Romance, Germanic, Slavonic, Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Baltic. The Germanic group contains two branches: the Scandinavian languages and the German languages. And English is one of the German languages.
HISTORY: Two thousand years ago The British Isles were inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages. These languages still survive in parts of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Brittany in France. The Celts were conquered(podrobit,dobýt,zvítězit) by the Romans, and from 43 BC to about AD 410 the areas which are now England and Wales were part of the Roman Empire, and Latin was the language of government. Between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, the Anglo-Saxon arrived from what is now  northern Germany, Holland and Denmark, and occupied most of England, and parts of southern Scotland. The Anglo-Saxons spoke a Germanic language  which forms the basis(základ) of modern English. This language was modified(pozměnit,upravit) by the arrival of Viking invanders (útočník) in the north and east of the country, who came from Norway and Denmark between the eighth and eleventh centuries. These Scandinavian settlers spoke Old Norse, which was related (spřízněný,příbuzný) to Anglo-Saxon. The mixing of the two languages greatly( značně) improved the vocabulary of English. In 1066 England was conquered by the French-speaking Normans , and French became the language of government. For the next three hundred years three languages co-existed. The aristocracy spoke French, the ordinary people spoke English, while Latin was used in the church. Today English vocabularies approximately half Germanic( from the Saxons and Vikings) and half Romance( from French and Latin). There are great borrowings(převzatá slova) from other languages- Italien, Spanish, Dutsch, Arabic and American Indian. English has changed so much in the last 1500 years that it would now be hardly recognisable to the Anglo-Saxons who brought the language across the North See. Old English was a highly inflected(skloňovaný) language.  Some modern English words still inflect, but much less so than in other European languages. The trend towards(směrem k) simplicity of form is considered to be a strength(síla) of English. Another strength is the flexibility of function of individual words.
USE OF ENGLISH: Approximately 350 million people speak English as their first language. About the same number use it as a second language. It is the language of international sports and pop music. It is an official language in 44 countries.