section_path: Vocabulary/Word origins
section_name: Word origins
paragraph_text: Word origins
  
  Source languages of the English vocabulary
  
  English, besides forming new words from existing words and their roots, also borrows words from other languages. This borrowing is commonplace in many world languages, but English has been especially open to borrowing of foreign words throughout the last 1,000 years. Nevertheless, most of the core vocabulary and the most common words in English are still West Germanic. The English words first learned by children as they learn to speak are mainly Germanic words from Old English. It is not possible to speak or write English without Germanic words, but it is possible to write or speak many sentences in English without foreign loanwords.
  
  But one of the consequences of long language contact between French and English in all stages of their development is that the vocabulary of English has a very high percentage of "Latinate" words (derived from French, especially, and also from other Romance languages and Latin). French words from various periods of the development of French now make up one-third of the vocabulary of English. Linguist Anthony Lacoudre estimated that over 40,000 English words are of French origin and may be understood without orthographical change by French speakers. Words of Old Norse origin have entered the English language primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and northern England. Many of these words are part of English core vocabulary, such as egg and knife.
  
  English has also borrowed many words directly from Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages, during all stages of its development. Many of these words had earlier been borrowed into Latin from Greek. Latin or Greek are still highly productive sources of stems used to form vocabulary of subjects learned in higher education such as the sciences, philosophy, and mathematics. English continues to gain new loanwords and calques ("loan translations") from languages all over the world, and words from languages other than the ancestral Anglo-Saxon language make up about 60% of the vocabulary of English.
  
  English has formal and informal speech registers; informal registers, including child-directed speech, tend to be made up predominantly of words of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the percentage of vocabulary that is of Latinate origin is higher in legal, scientific, and academic texts.