Friends- British accent

[Anomalocaris]

You conveniently left out


English is in one of the Germanic language families (West Germanic, I think, but can't be arsed to look it up).  Languages in the Latin family are referred to as 'Romance Languages', which manifestly do not include English.

Boru

What I always understood about the British Isles is that the immigration of European-Roman speaking waves is what started English; a language to make the diverse immigration movement understand itself.

In that regard any European wave immigrating to the isles of Britain was "speaking a Roman language to some extent".

Define “roman language”.

Roman vocabulary?

roman grammar?

English is a hybrid language in which more than half of the vocabulary came ultimately from Latin,  and whose grammar is an unusually and simplified version of the Germanic grammatical system.

The overall vocabulary of a language can change very quickly and dramatically, but overall grammatical structure seems more persistent,   So linguist use overall Similarity in grammar far more than overall similarity on vocabulary to classify languages and determine the relationship between different languages.  so grammar says English is a Germanic language.

However, while overall vocabulary can change drastically, some fundamental core vocabulary also tend to be persistent.   The core part of English vocabulary contains much higher percentage of Germanic words than the rest of the English vocabulary.   So a superficial look at the roots of overall English vocabulary may say Latin,  a more detailed look at the roots of core English vocabulary says german.

Another reason why English’ s Latin sourced vocabulary does not suggest English descended from Latin:   The Latin words in English often clearly came from another Romance language, primarily different stages of French, and not from original Latin as spoken by the romans.  This is another indication that English is a pre-existing language that borrowed a lot of latin words at different times, rather than a language that originally descended from Latin. 

As a Germanic language, English grammar is both unusual and simplified compared to other german languages.  It changed the archetypical subject-object-verb word order of most Germanic language to subject-verb-object.   There are enough traits in the English grammar to define English as a Germanic language.  But there are many grammar rules that are almost universal in all other Germanic languages, past and present, such as noun gender, which are not present in English.     This again highlights the unusual nature of English.

Linguists have found that if a language is passed down primarily by being taught to infants and young children by adult native speakers from generation to generation, than grammatically complexity of the language tends to gradually increase.   So languages spoken by relative few people in insular societies tends to be highly complex.    On the other hand if the language goes through a period when a large number of its speakers were taught to speak it as adults, then the language tends to undergo grammatically simplification.  There are many examples where language Was imposed as the lingual Franca of an empire over a long period, and gradually the language became grammatically simpler as time went on.   

The exception to this rule of insular language tend to gain complexity while a everyday lingua Franca over a large region where there are many other native tongues tend to lose complexity is If a language is used as liturgical or rarified literary language.  In that case the complexity of language tend to be conserved. 

Grammatically English has lost more of the original grammatical traits and rules of ancestral German Than  other Germanic language.   This has been interpreted to mean that when Germanic ancesters  of the English language was first brought to the British isles the land was inhabited primarily by people who spoke other unrelated languages.  Germanic language was then imposed on those people, who had to learn it as adults.  As a result, the old grammar was greatly simplified, resulting in modern English.

So, it is not incorrect to say there is no good English.  All modern English is bad English because modern English is the product of generations of people learning German grammar badly.    The fact that English is simplified and continues to become more simplified suggest English is not really a literary language.