English (people)
The Englishman ( English the English or English people are) a nation of about 50 million people (with English-born diaspora about 90 million), mainly in England living, the largest country on the island of Great Britain . They make up about 84% of the UK's population . In addition, (often large) parts of the population in the other parts of the British Isles, i.e. Ireland (especially Northern Ireland ), Scotland and Wales and the (immigrant, non- indigenous ) population of some countries of the former British Empire or the Commonwealth are ethnically English Descent (mainly in Australia , Ireland , Canada , New Zealand , South Africa and the United States of America ).
In the German-speaking world , all residents of the United Kingdom are often incorrectly referred to as English , although all citizens of the United Kingdom as a whole are called British . In relation to the respective parts of the country one speaks of English, Scots , Welsh , Irish , Cornish or Manx .
language
Their language is English / Inglis , which has been uniformly established since the 14th century (before 1066, Englisc ), which arose from the Old Saxon of the Saxons and is therefore one of the West Germanic languages. The name is derived from the tribe of the Angles (Land der Angling-Englelond / Ingland-England). Until the early Middle Ages, island Celtic , more Goidelic and Britannic languages , from 1066, the Anglo Norman been in use in England.
History of English identity
According to a widespread view, the English emerged from the Celtic indigenous population of the British Isles and the Germanic peoples of the Angles , Saxons , Frisians and Jutes who immigrated from northern and central Europe from the 5th century onwards . These West Germans, which are grouped under the name Anglo-Saxons , were first called English at around the same time as the Romans withdrew from Great Britain, and their country was derived from this as England . The Anglo-Saxons would have largely displaced the Celtic- British natives in the area of what is now England (with the exception of Cornwall ) .
The British physician Stephen Oppenheimer contradicts this view. In his opinion, genetic studies show that the English are largely descended from the pre-Celtic indigenous people who immigrated from the Iberian Peninsula after the end of the last Ice Age . Later immigrants such as the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans contributed little to the English gene pool . The British evolutionary geneticist Mark G. Thomas contradicts this view. From y-chromosomal matches between English, Frisian and Scandinavian men, he draws the conclusion that the Anglo-Saxon conquerors would have exterminated 50 to 100 percent of the population found, so that today's English would largely descend from them.
In the 9th and 10th centuries there was a not insignificant regional Danish immigration ( Danelag ). At the same time, the English were united under a common rule for the first time. In 937 there was the first Anglo-Saxon-English kingdom under Æthelstan , which extended over all of today's England.
From 1066 and the Norman conquest of England ( Battle of Hastings ) there was also a strong Norman influence, the Normans became England's new social elite.
Until the 18th century, the identities of the English, Scots and Irish were clearly separated from each other (with the exception of the Anglo-Irish upper class in Ireland). Only with the personal union of Jacob VI. or Jacob I as King of Scotland and England and with the Act of Union 1707 , which united Great Britain politically, something like a British identity emerged. This also applied to a lesser extent to Ireland, which was politically united with Great Britain in the Act of Union 1800 . Since the early modern period, an identity of its own, shaped by Catholicism and Gaelic- Celtic tradition, developed there, in contrast to the British- Protestant one . This contrast led to a strong striving for independence, so that Ireland with a large part of its national territory split off from British rule in 1922 as the Irish Free State , later the Republic of Ireland .
religion
In ancient times and the early Middle Ages, the English adhered to an Anglo-Saxon polytheism . They first came into contact with Christianity in the 7th century and were influenced by both Celtic monasticism and the early Roman Church . During the High and Late Middle Ages, most of the English were supporters of the Catholic Church.
Since the English Reformation initiated by Henry VIII (Act of Supremacy 1534), however, the majority of the English belonged to the new Anglican state church . In the following 150 years or so, the monarchs changed their denominations again and again, before Anglicanism was established as the state religion and the religion of kings in the Glorious Revolution of the late 1680s . England saw itself as the leader of the Protestant powers in Europe from the 17th to the early 18th century at the latest. Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants ( dissenters ) were discriminated against until modern times and were not regarded as English. England is also the homeland of Puritanism and Methodism , whose dissenters mostly fled (especially to North America). The (also politically motivated) tensions between the different directions of Protestantism and Catholicism erupted in the English Civil War .
Due to the connection between the monarchy and the Protestant state church, English identity is still strongly characterized by an anti-Catholic, Protestant-Anglican self-image.
Culture
literature
The early medieval Arthurian legend is associated with pre-Anglo-Saxon England and is part of the English national identity. In the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer established Middle English as the national language through his literature . The most famous exponent of early modern English literature and one of the most famous playwrights in the world is William Shakespeare . He shaped the modern English language with his dramas and is often referred to as the national poet of England. The Victorian England reflected the works, among other things Jane Austen resist.
Philosophy and intellectual history
The scholasticism , the utilitarianism , of empiricism , of pragmatism , the Enlightenment and rationalism were partly decisively influenced by the English philosopher and statesman theorists. The names William of Ockham , Francis Bacon , Thomas More , Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , Edmund Burke , Thomas Paine , Jeremy Bentham , John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell are associated with these ideas from the history of ideas .
music
In the music of England, Anglican church music was particularly influential in the Middle Ages. The compositions of Henry Purcell , Edward Elgar , Benjamin Brittens and Malcolm Arnold were formative in modern times . In the second half of the 20th century, the English made decisive contributions to beat music ( Beatles , see also British Invasion ), rock and rock 'n' roll ( Rolling Stones , The Who , Led Zeppelin , Pink Floyd , Queen, etc.), of which later alternative rock or indie rock ( The Smiths et al.) and Britpop ( Blur , Oasis et al.) were influenced.
architecture
A classicist - baroque specifically English architecture in the late 17th and early 18th century, especially by Sir Christopher Wren , embossed, the Royal General architects of England. The Georgian architecture of the 18th and early 19th century was not only in the UK and Ireland ( Georgian Dublin ), but also in the first American colonies , the later the United States , and other British colonies dominant. Neo-Gothic spread from England in the 1740s . The Victorian architecture combined neoclassicism and Gothic Revival partly historicizing and eclectic .
Englishmen such as Norman Foster , Michael Wilford and David Chipperfield were and are formative for modern and postmodern architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries .
Population development
The population of England was estimated to be just over 1 million in 1066 and around 2.5 million in 1215. A plague wave in the middle of the 14th century reduced the population from 3.5 (1348) to 2.5 million (1350). That number nearly doubled by 1570 (4.8 million).
At the beginning of the 17th century there were about 5.8 million people in England. This doubled to 13 million in about 230 years (1831). During industrialization and in the Victorian era , the population rose rapidly within a few decades: at the beginning of the 20th century, the population of England exceeded the 30 million mark. The increase has slowed in the last hundred years, slowed down by the two world wars, among other things. In 1951 there were just over 40 million British people, and in 2001 there were almost 50 million. Today England has a little over 51 million people. However, this number includes several million non-English immigrants, traditionally mainly from South Asia ( India and Pakistan ) and Africa , but in recent years also from Central and Eastern Europe (especially Poland ).
Diaspora
In a US census in 2000, approximately 24.5 million Americans reported being of English ancestry. There, the north-east in particular is inhabited by English-born people and influenced by English architecture and culture. In 2006, 6.6 million in Canada and 6.3 million in Australia were of English ancestry. In addition, there are also people of English descent in southern Africa (especially the Republic of South Africa), New Zealand and partly in South America .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ [1] Office for National Statistics, accessed June 14, 2010 (English)
- ^ Stephen Oppenheimer: The Origins of the British. A Genetic Detective Story . Constable & Robinson, London 2006.
- ↑ Nicholas Wade: A United Kingdom? Maybe. In: New York Times, March 6, 2007 ( online , accessed September 21, 2014).