Modern English
Today's spoken language
Modern English is the form of English spoken from roughly the late 15th century onward, distinguishing it from Old English and Middle English.
The term usually appears in historical or linguistic contexts: Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English.
In casual use, it can simply mean contemporary, current English: Can you translate that into Modern English?
- anglicismEnglish loanword abroad
- Great Vowel ShiftHistorical English pronunciation change
- grammarLanguage's structural rules
- lexiconVocabulary of a language
- lingua francaShared tongue between peoples
global language · British accent · semantics · verb forms · word order · language · syntax · present tense · passive voice · split infinitive · globalization · nominalization · inflection · subject-verb agreement · verb conjugation · synth-pop · orthography · etymology
- historical linguisticslanguage families, cognates, proto-languages, proto-language, Indo-European
- English historyNorman Conquest, Domesday Book, Magna Carta, King Alfred, Henry VIII
- GothJoy Division, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, The Damned, Robert Smith
Modern EnglishOld English
Germanic language of early Britain
Anglo-Saxon · Middle English · Proto-Germanic · Early Modern English · Northumbrian
Modern Englisharchaic English
Outdated form of language
classical languages · dead languages · ancient languages · traditional grammar
modern, modernity, modernism, modernist, modernize, modernization, modernized, modernizing, modernistic