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English belongs to the Germanic languages branch of the Indo-European language family.
It is one of the most popular languages in the world, with approximately 1.5 billion speakers, the mother tongue of more than 350 million people, and the most widely taught foreign language.
To someone who is well versed in the language, the mistakes in these pictures might seem absurd, but despite its prevalence, English is quite hard to learn.
"The most difficulty arises when people ... don’t have the advantage of sharing many borrowed words or grammatical patterns," "Sean Sutherland, senior lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Westminster, United Kingom, said.
"This will include speakers of Arabic, Urdu, and Bengali"
In his own experience, the most common complaint learners make about English is that the spelling of words often has little or nothing to do with their pronunciation.
"It’s easy enough to teach someone how to write the letter 'a', for example, but then they must be taught that its pronunciation changes in words like hat, hate, and father. In oak, it isn’t pronounced at all," the linguist explained.
"Compare this to the simplicity of Spanish, a language in which an 'a' and other vowels rarely change pronunciation from word to word."
Furthermore, English keeps adopting new words from other languages (350, to be exact, according to David Crystal's book 'English as a Global Language').
With so many sources behind its evolution, English is malleable, or as Robert Burchfield, calls it in 'The English Language', "a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless."
No form of linguistic engineering and no amount of linguistic legislation will prevent the myriads of change that lie ahead, he said, and people whose texts ended up on 'Engrish' would probably agree.
