In many cases, where two words are very similar in unrelated languages, one language lent a word to another (e.g. There so many possible sound combinations for any given word that coincidence is next to impossible. How did this happen? Couldn’t this just be a coincidence? If you sound out each Hindi word, you’ll see how close the English and Hindi words actually are the Hindi words have generally added the –a sound to the end of the words and the roots are slightly different (e.g. This sounds dubious to the uninitiated, but it’s true! Take a look at the following Hindi words and their accompanying meanings: Speakers of Modern English and Modern Hindi were once part of the same tribe. Listen to this clip of Proto Indo-European, as reconstructed by historical linguists: This actually implies that speakers of English and Hindi once spoke the same language. Together we’ll look at the history of English and the journey it has taken from Paleolithic times, when it was proto Indo-European, to the bewildering genealogy of the lexicon we use today.Įven though London (the capital of the United Kingdom) is separated from New Delhi (the capital of India) by around 6,000 miles, the dominant languages in use in these two cities, Hindi and English, are in fact related to each other. Yet we might take for granted how our language came to be what it is today. And when, for example, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Argentina played each other in the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the players largely communicated with each other and referees in - you guessed it - English. It is the official language of 58 sovereign nations in all six habitable continents. The English language is the conduit of more human contact than any other language in the world.