In modern English, " Americans " generally refers to residents of the United States, and among native speakers of English this usage is almost universal, with any other use of the term requiring specification of the subject under discussion.

English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, and Russian speakers may use the term American to refer to either inhabitants of the Americas or to U. S. nationals.

English speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are different: the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated ( plain ).

English speakers may be unaware of the differences among six allophones of the phoneme, namely unreleased as in cat, aspirated as in top, glottalized as in button, flapped as in American English water, nasalized flapped as in winter, and none of the above as in stop.

Native Hindi speakers pronounce / व / as in vrat (' व ् रत ', fast ) but in pakwan (' पकव ा न ', food dish ), treating them as a single phoneme and without being aware of the allophone distinctions they are subconsciously making, though these are apparent to native English speakers.

Similarly, Hindi-Urdu speakers might unconsciously apply their native ' v-w ' allophony rules to English words, pronouncing war as var or advance as adwance, which can result in intelligibility problems with native English speakers.

Darker shades of blue indicate higher concentrations of native English speakers in the corresponding states.

Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States.

Chief among other English dialects are Canadian English ( based on the English of United Empire Loyalists who left the 13 Colonies ), and Australian English, which rank third and fourth in number of native speakers.

English voiceless stops are aspirated for most native speakers when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable, as in pen, ten, Ken.

" Pearl milk tea " is also used by English speakers and overseas Chinese and Taiwanese speakers, but it is usually called bubble tea.

* 珍珠奶茶 or 珍奶 for short ) (): " pearl milk tea ", or more commonly referred to as bubble tea by most English speakers and overseas Chinese speakers.

* 波霸奶茶 (): " bubble milk tea " and also commonly referred to as boba tea by English speakers and Asian Americans.

The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion ; the first was by language speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family ; they conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries.

`` You do not know me '', she said in good English, `` but my mother was your governess in Philadelphia when you were a child ''.

Many English Catholics are proud of their Catholicism and know that they are in a new ascendancy.

`` I don't believe I know you, and I can't understand your quaint brand of English -- it was meant to be English, wasn't it ''??

Alfred sought to remedy this through an ambitious court-centred programme of translating into English the books he deemed " most necessary for all men to know.

For example, the English verbs " to know " ( the state of knowing ) and " to find out " ( knowing viewed as a " completed action ") correspond to the imperfect and perfect of the French verb " savoir ".

A German diplomat, Truetzschler von Falkenstein, complained after the war that " Ribbentrop, having had contact with only a small group in England – representatives of the so-called two hundred families – did not know the great mass of the English people.

The word was adopted into English in the nineteenth century from medieval Icelandic treatises on poetics, in particular the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, and derives ultimately from the Old Norse verb kenna “ know, recognise ; perceive, feel ; show ; teach ; etc .”, as used in the expression kenna við “ to name after ; to express thing in terms of ”, “ name after ; refer to in terms of ”, and kenna til “ qualify by, make into a kenning by adding ”.

Old Norse kenna ( Modern Icelandic kenna, Swedish känna, Danish kende, Norwegian kjenne or kjenna ) is cognate with Old English cennan, Old Frisian kenna, kanna, Old Saxon ( ant ) kennian ( Middle Dutch and Dutch kennen ), Old High German ( ir -, in -, pi -) chennan ( Middle High German and German kennen ), Gothic kannjan < Proto-Germanic * kannjanan, originally causative of * kunnanan “ to know ( how to )”, whence Modern English can ' to be able ' ( from the same Proto-Indo-European root as Modern English know and Latin-derived cognition ).

" Mr. Speaker, among all the people of the universe, I know none who have shown so much zeal for the liberty of their country, as the English, at this time, have done.

In 1489 King Henry VII of England commissioned the translation of De re militari into English " so every gentleman born to arms and all manner of men of war, captains, soldiers, vituallers and all others would know how they ought to behave in the feats of wars and battles ".

Except for two scenes in all the novels, all Nexus inhabitants speak English, though they may know other languages or have a planetary accent.

From this period we sometimes know the origins and authors of rhymes — for instance, " Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ", which combined the 18th-century French tune " Ah vous dirai-je, Maman " with a poem by English writer Jane Taylor and ' Mary Had a Little Lamb ', written by Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston in 1830.

However, an average adult American is not expected to know " Fair in the cradle, foul in the saddle ", an old English proverb that is not part of the current American paremiological minimum.

The palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text ( that is, a 21st-century English or French speaker must become expert in the relevant earlier forms of these languages ); and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal / notarial abbreviations.

English example: I know what I like.

Oswald gave the island of Lindisfarne to Aidan as his episcopal see, and Aidan achieved great success in spreading the Christian faith ; Bede mentions that Oswald acted as Aidan's interpreter when the latter was preaching, since Aidan did not know English well and Oswald had learned Irish during his exile.

Several stories later emerged suggesting that the band had initially been called ' English Rose ' or that the name was somehow linked to The Rolling Stones, but these were untrue, Brown explaining " No, I don't know where that English Rose story came from.

With traditional nationalistic spirit, some Englishmen claim that English Catholicism is Catholicism at its best.

[...] It is not as philosophically thorough as the works of D. Saliba, A. M. Goichon, or L. Gardet, but it is probably the best essay in English on this important thinker of the Middle Ages.

* Adrian Utley ( born 1957 ), English musician best known as a member of the band Portishead

Alfred Edward Housman (; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936 ), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

Helen Beatrix Potter ( 28 July 186622 December 1943 ) was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children ’ s books featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit which celebrated the British landscape and country life.

Sir Charles Spencer " Charlie " Chaplin, KBE ( 16 April 188925 December 1977 ) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era.

The best English edition is by James Waterworth ( London, 1848 ; With Essays on the External and Internal History of the Council ).

However, the best modern analysis of the sources of the creed ( by A. de Halleux, in Revue Theologique de Louvain 7, 1976 ) and a reading of the acts, or proceedings, of the council ( recently translated into English ) show that the bishops considered Cyril the great authority and that even the language of ' two natures ' derives from him.

* Charles Darwin ( 1809 – 1882 ), English naturalist and writer, best known as the originator of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection

Academically, Eisenhower's best subject by far was English ; otherwise his performance was average, though he thoroughly enjoyed the typical emphasis of engineering on science and mathematics.

T. S. Eliot called Collins's novel The Moonstone ( 1868 ) " the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels ... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe ", and Dorothy L. Sayers called it " probably the very finest detective story ever written ".

Gender is at best only weakly grammaticalized in Modern English.

In 2004 the Dylan Thomas Prize was created in his honour, awarded to the best published writer in English under the age of 30.

David Thomas " Davy " Jones ( 30 December 1945 – 29 February 2012 ) was an English recording artist, actor, and businessman, best known as a member of the musical group The Monkees and star of the TV series of the same name.

He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class ( 1963 ).

30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848 ) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her solitary novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature.

Edwin Abbott Abbott ( 20 December 1838 – 12 October 1926 ), English schoolmaster and theologian, is best known as the author of the satirical novella Flatland ( 1884 ).

The following year The Arte of English Poesie, attributed to George Puttenham, placed Oxford among a " crew " of courtier poets ; he also considered Oxford among the best comic playwrights of the day.

His best known works to have been translated into English are Cooking in Ten Minutes and Cooking with Pomiane.

Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.

According to Irving Howe, Orwell was " the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson.

His international goals-to-games ratio remains one of the best for the country and he is regarded as one of the all-time best English strikers.