English is, to be specific, a Indo-European, Germanic language. That would make it related to languages such as French, German, Swedish and Dutch. The English language has many dialects spread across several countries. Roughly 470, 000, 000 speak english as either a first or second language. This makes the english language the second largest language in the world, next to Mandarin. Although it takes second place in the number of people who speak it, it is the most widely spread. Some dialects in the United Kingdom include: Cockney, Cumberland, Devonshire, Norfolk and Craven. English also has the largest vocabulary of all known languages. It has a 60% lexical similarity with German, 27% with French, and 24% with Russian.