title: Android (operating system)

text: Patches to bugs found in the core operating system often do not reach users of older and lower-priced devices. However, the open-source nature of Android allows security contractors to take existing devices and adapt them for highly secure uses. For example, Samsung has worked with General Dynamics through their Open Kernel Labs acquisition to rebuild "Jelly Bean" on top of their hardened microvisor for the "Knox" project.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android smartphones have the ability to report the location of Wi-Fi access points, encountered as phone users move around, to build databases containing the physical locations of hundreds of millions of such access points. These databases form electronic maps to locate smartphones, allowing them to run apps like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Facebook Places, and to deliver location-based ads. Third party monitoring software such as TaintDroid, an academic research-funded project, can, in some cases, detect when personal information is being sent from applications to remote servers.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In 2018, Norwegian security firm Promon has unearthed a serious Android security hole which can be exploited to steal login credentials, access messages, and track location, which could be found in all versions of Android, including Android 10. The vulnerability came by exploiting a bug in the multitasking system enabling a malicious app to overlay legitimate apps with fake login screens that users are not aware of when handing in security credentials. Users can also be tricked into granting additional permissions to the malicious apps, which later enable them to perform various nefarious activities, including intercepting texts or calls and stealing banking credentials. "Avast Threat Labs" also discovered that many pre-installed apps on several hundred new Android devices contain dangerous malware and adware. Some of the preinstalled malware can commit ad fraud or even take over its host device.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In 2020, the Which? watchdog reported that more than a billion Android devices released in 2012 or earlier, which was 40% of Android devices worldwide, were at risk of being hacked. This conclusion stemmed from the fact that no security updates were issued for the Android versions below 7.0 in 2019. Which? collaborated with the AV Comparatives anti-virus lab to infect five phone models with malware, and it succeeded in each case. Google refused to comment on the watchdog's speculations.


title: Android (operating system)

text: On August 5, 2020, Twitter published a blog urging its users to update their applications to the latest version with regards to a security concern that allowed others to access direct messages. A hacker could easily use the "Android system permissions" to fetch the account credentials in order to do so. The security issue is only with Android 8 (Android Oreo) and Android 9 (Android Pie). Twitter confirmed that updating the app will restrict such practices.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android applications run in a sandbox, an isolated area of the system that does not have access to the rest of the system's resources, unless access permissions are explicitly granted by the user when the application is installed, however this may not be possible for pre-installed apps. It is not possible, for example, to turn off the microphone access of the pre-installed camera app without disabling the camera completely. This is valid also in Android versions 7 and 8.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Since February 2012, Google has used its Google Bouncer malware scanner to watch over and scan apps available in the Google Play store. A "Verify Apps" feature was introduced in November 2012, as part of the Android 4.2 "Jelly Bean" operating system version, to scan all apps, both from Google Play and from third-party sources, for malicious behaviour. Originally only doing so during installation, Verify Apps received an update in 2014 to "constantly" scan apps, and in 2017 the feature was made visible to users through a menu in Settings.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Before installing an application, the Google Play store displays a list of the requirements an app needs to function. After reviewing these permissions, the user can choose to accept or refuse them, installing the application only if they accept. In Android 6.0 "Marshmallow", the permissions system was changed; apps are no longer automatically granted all of their specified permissions at installation time. An opt-in system is used instead, in which users are prompted to grant or deny individual permissions to an app when they are needed for the first time. Applications remember the grants, which can be revoked by the user at any time. Pre-installed apps, however, are not always part of this approach. In some cases it may not be possible to deny certain permissions to pre-installed apps, nor be possible to disable them. The Google Play Services app cannot be uninstalled, nor disabled. Any force stop attempt, result in the app restarting itself. The new permissions model is used only by applications developed for Marshmallow using its software development kit (SDK), and older apps will continue to use the previous all-or-nothing approach. Permissions can still be revoked for those apps, though this might prevent them from working properly, and a warning is displayed to that effect.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In September 2014, Jason Nova of "Android Authority" reported on a study by the German security company Fraunhofer AISEC in antivirus software and malware threats on Android. Nova wrote that "The Android operating system deals with software packages by sandboxing them; this does not allow applications to list the directory contents of other apps to keep the system safe. By not allowing the antivirus to list the directories of other apps after installation, applications that show no inherent suspicious behavior when downloaded are cleared as safe. If then later on parts of the app are activated that turn out to be malicious, the antivirus will have no way to know since it is inside the app and out of the antivirus' jurisdiction". The study by Fraunhofer AISEC, examining antivirus software from Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Lookout, McAfee (formerly Intel Security), Norton, Sophos, and Trend Micro, revealed that "the tested antivirus apps do not provide protection against customized malware or targeted attacks", and that "the tested antivirus apps were also not able to detect malware which is completely unknown to date but does not make any efforts to hide its malignity".


title: Android (operating system)

text: In August 2013, Google announced Android Device Manager (renamed Find My Device in May 2017), a service that allows users to remotely track, locate, and wipe their Android device, with an Android app for the service released in December. In December 2016, Google introduced a Trusted Contacts app, letting users request location-tracking of loved ones during emergencies. In 2020, Trusted Contacts was shut down and the location-sharing feature rolled into Google Maps.


title: Android (operating system)

text: On October 8, 2018, Google announced new Google Play store requirements to combat over-sharing of potentially sensitive information, including call and text logs. The issue stems from the fact that many apps request permissions to access users' personal information (even if this information is not needed for the app to function) and some users unquestionably grant these permissions. Alternatively, a permission might be listed in the app manifest as required (as opposed to optional) and the app would not install unless user grants the permission; users can withdraw any, even required, permissions from any app in the device settings after app installation, but few users do this. Google promised to work with developers and create exceptions if their apps require Phone or SMS permissions for "core app functionality". The new policies enforcement started on January 6, 2019, 90 days after policy announcement on October 8, 2018. Furthermore, Google announced a new "target API level requirement" (codice_7 in manifest) at least Android 8.0 (API level 26) for all new apps and app updates. The API level requirement might combat the practice of app developers bypassing some permission screens by specifying early Android versions that had a coarser permission model.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Dependence on proprietary Google Play Services and customizations added on top of the operating system by vendors who license Android from Google is causing privacy concerns.


title: Android (operating system)

text: The source code for Android is open-source: it is developed in private by Google, with the source code released publicly when a new version of Android is released. Google publishes most of the code (including network and telephony stacks) under the non-copyleft Apache License version 2.0. which allows modification and redistribution. The license does not grant rights to the "Android" trademark, so device manufacturers and wireless carriers have to license it from Google under individual contracts. Associated Linux kernel changes are released under the copyleft GNU General Public License version 2, developed by the Open Handset Alliance, with the source code publicly available at all times. The only Android release which was not immediately made available as source code was the tablet-only 3.0 "Honeycomb" release. The reason, according to Andy Rubin in an official Android blog post, was because "Honeycomb" was rushed for production of the Motorola Xoom, and they did not want third parties creating a "really bad user experience" by attempting to put onto smartphones a version of Android intended for tablets.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Only the base Android operating system (including some applications) is open-source software, whereas most Android devices ship with a substantial amount of proprietary software, such as Google Mobile Services, which includes applications such as Google Play Store, Google Search, and Google Play Services a software layer that provides APIs for the integration with Google-provided services, among others. These applications must be licensed from Google by device makers, and can only be shipped on devices which meet its compatibility guidelines and other requirements. Custom, certified distributions of Android produced by manufacturers (such as Samsung Experience) may also replace certain stock Android apps with their own proprietary variants and add additional software not included in the stock Android operating system. With the advent of the Google Pixel line of devices, Google itself has also made specific Android features timed or permanent exclusives to the Pixel series. There may also be "binary blob" drivers required for certain hardware components in the device. The best known fully open source Android services are the LineageOS distribution and MicroG which acts as an open source replacement of Google Play Services.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have been critical of Android and have recommended the usage of alternatives such as Replicant, because drivers and firmware vital for the proper functioning of Android devices are usually proprietary, and because the Google Play Store application can forcibly install or uninstall applications and, as a result, invite non-free software. In both cases, the use of closed-source software causes the system to become vulnerable to backdoors.


title: Android (operating system)

text: It has been argued that because developers are often required to purchase the Google-branded Android license, this has turned the theoretically open system into a freemium service.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Google licenses their Google Mobile Services software, along with the Android trademarks, only to hardware manufacturers for devices that meet Google's compatibility standards specified in the Android Compatibility Program document. Thus, forks of Android that make major changes to the operating system itself do not include any of Google's non-free components, stay incompatible with applications that require them, and must ship with an alternative software marketplace in lieu of Google Play Store. A prominent example of such an Android fork is Amazon's Fire OS, which is used on the Kindle Fire line of tablets, and oriented toward Amazon services. The shipment of Android devices without GMS is also common in mainland China, as Google does not do business there.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In 2014, Google also began to require that all Android devices which license the Google Mobile Services software display a prominent "Powered by Android" logo on their boot screens. Google has also enforced preferential bundling and placement of Google Mobile Services on devices, including mandated bundling of the entire main suite of Google applications, mandatory placement of shortcuts to Google Search and the Play Store app on or near the main home screen page in its default configuration, and granting a larger share of search revenue to OEMs who agree to not include third-party app stores on their devices. In March 2018, it was reported that Google had begun to block "uncertified" Android devices from using Google Mobile Services software, and display a warning indicating that "the device manufacturer has preloaded Google apps and services without certification from Google". Users of custom ROMs can register their device ID to their Google account to remove this block.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Some stock applications and components in AOSP code that were formerly used by earlier versions of Android, such as Search, Music, Calendar, and the location API, were abandoned by Google in favor of non-free replacements distributed through Play Store (Google Search, Google Play Music, and Google Calendar) and Google Play Services, which are no longer open-source. Moreover, open-source variants of some applications also exclude functions that are present in their non-free versions. These measures are likely intended to discourage forks and encourage commercial licensing in line with Google requirements, as the majority of the operating system's core functionality is dependent on proprietary components licensed exclusively by Google, and it would take significant development resources to develop an alternative suite of software and APIs to replicate or replace them. Apps that do not use Google components would also be at a functional disadvantage, as they can only use APIs contained within the OS itself. In turn, third-party apps may have dependencies on Google Play Services.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Members of the Open Handset Alliance, which include the majority of Android OEMs, are also contractually forbidden from producing Android devices based on forks of the OS; in 2012, Acer Inc. was forced by Google to halt production on a device powered by Alibaba Group's Aliyun OS with threats of removal from the OHA, as Google deemed the platform to be an incompatible version of Android. Alibaba Group defended the allegations, arguing that the OS was a distinct platform from Android (primarily using HTML5 apps), but incorporated portions of Android's platform to allow backwards compatibility with third-party Android software. Indeed, the devices did ship with an application store which offered Android apps; however, the majority of them were pirated.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android received a lukewarm reaction when it was unveiled in 2007. Although analysts were impressed with the respected technology companies that had partnered with Google to form the Open Handset Alliance, it was unclear whether mobile phone manufacturers would be willing to replace their existing operating systems with Android. The idea of an open-source, Linux-based development platform sparked interest, but there were additional worries about Android facing strong competition from established players in the smartphone market, such as Nokia and Microsoft, and rival Linux mobile operating systems that were in development. These established players were skeptical: Nokia was quoted as saying "we don't see this as a threat", and a member of Microsoft's Windows Mobile team stated "I don't understand the impact that they are going to have."


title: Android (operating system)

text: Since then Android has grown to become the most widely used smartphone operating system and "one of the fastest mobile experiences available". Reviewers have highlighted the open-source nature of the operating system as one of its defining strengths, allowing companies such as Nokia (Nokia X family), Amazon (Kindle Fire), Barnes & Noble (Nook), Ouya, Baidu and others to fork the software and release hardware running their own customised version of Android. As a result, it has been described by technology website "Ars Technica" as "practically the default operating system for launching new hardware" for companies without their own mobile platforms. This openness and flexibility is also present at the level of the end user: Android allows extensive customisation of devices by their owners and apps are freely available from non-Google app stores and third party websites. These have been cited as among the main advantages of Android phones over others.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Despite Android's popularity, including an activation rate three times that of iOS, there have been reports that Google has not been able to leverage their other products and web services successfully to turn Android into the money maker that analysts had expected. "The Verge" suggested that Google is losing control of Android due to the extensive customization and proliferation of non-Google apps and services Amazon's Kindle Fire line uses Fire OS, a heavily modified fork of Android which does not include or support any of Google's proprietary components, and requires that users obtain software from its competing Amazon Appstore instead of Play Store. In 2014, in an effort to improve prominence of the Android brand, Google began to require that devices featuring its proprietary components display an Android logo on the boot screen.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android has suffered from "fragmentation", a situation where the variety of Android devices, in terms of both hardware variations and differences in the software running on them, makes the task of developing applications that work consistently across the ecosystem harder than rival platforms such as iOS where hardware and software varies less. For example, according to data from OpenSignal in July 2013, there were 11,868 models of Android devices, numerous screen sizes and eight Android OS versions simultaneously in use, while the large majority of iOS users have upgraded to the latest iteration of that OS. Critics such as "Apple Insider" have asserted that fragmentation via hardware and software pushed Android's growth through large volumes of low end, budget-priced devices running older versions of Android. They maintain this forces Android developers to write for the "lowest common denominator" to reach as many users as possible, who have too little incentive to make use of the latest hardware or software features only available on a smaller percentage of devices. However, OpenSignal, who develops both Android and iOS apps, concluded that although fragmentation can make development trickier, Android's wider global reach also increases the potential reward.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android is the most used operating system on phones in virtually all countries, with some countries, such as India, having over 96% market share. On tablets, usage is more even, as iOS is a bit more popular globally.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Research company Canalys estimated in the second quarter of 2009, that Android had a 2.8% share of worldwide smartphone shipments. By May 2010, Android had a 10% worldwide smartphone market share, overtaking Windows Mobile, whilst in the US Android held a 28% share, overtaking iPhone OS. By the fourth quarter of 2010, its worldwide share had grown to 33% of the market becoming the top-selling smartphone platform, overtaking Symbian. In the US it became the top-selling platform in April 2011, overtaking BlackBerry OS with a 31.2% smartphone share, according to "comScore".


title: Android (operating system)

text: By the third quarter of 2011, Gartner estimated that more than half (52.5%) of the smartphone sales belonged to Android. By the third quarter of 2012 Android had a 75% share of the global smartphone market according to the research firm IDC.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In July 2011, Google said that 550,000 Android devices were being activated every day, up from 400,000 per day in May, and more than 100 million devices had been activated<ref name="i/o 2011 stats"></ref> with 4.4% growth per week. In September 2012, 500 million devices had been activated with 1.3 million activations per day. In May 2013, at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai announced that 900 million Android devices had been activated.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android market share varies by location. In July 2012, "mobile subscribers aged 13+" in the United States using Android were up to 52%, and rose to 90% in China. During the third quarter of 2012, Android's worldwide smartphone shipment market share was 75%, with 750 million devices activated in total. In April 2013, Android had 1.5 million activations per day. 48 billion application ("app") installation have been performed from the Google Play store, and by September 2013, one billion Android devices had been activated.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android devices account for more than half of smartphone sales in most markets, including the US, while "only in Japan was Apple on top" (September–November 2013 numbers). At the end of 2013, over 1.5 billion Android smartphones had been sold in the four years since 2010, making Android the most sold phone and tablet OS. Three billion Android smartphones were estimated to be sold by the end of 2014 (including previous years). According to Gartner research company, Android-based devices outsold all contenders, every year since 2012. In 2013, it outsold Windows 2.8:1 or by 573 million. Android has the largest installed base of all operating systems; Since 2013, devices running it also sell more than Windows, iOS and Mac OS X devices combined.


title: Android (operating system)

text: According to StatCounter, which tracks only the use for browsing the web, Android is the most popular mobile operating system since August 2013. Android is the most popular operating system for web browsing in India and several other countries (e.g. virtually all of Asia, with Japan and North Korea exceptions). According to StatCounter, Android is most used on mobile in all African countries, and it stated "mobile usage has already overtaken desktop in several countries including India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia", with virtually all countries in Africa having done so already (except for seven countries, including Egypt), such as Ethiopia and Kenya in which mobile (including tablets) usage is at 90.46% (Android only, accounts for 75.81% of all use there).


title: Android (operating system)

text: While Android phones in the Western world almost always include Google's proprietary code (such as Google Play) in the otherwise open-source operating system, Google's proprietary code and trademark is increasingly not used in emerging markets; "The growth of AOSP Android devices goes way beyond just China [..] ABI Research claims that 65 million devices shipped globally with open-source Android in the second quarter of [2014], up from 54 million in the first quarter"; depending on country, percent of phones estimated to be based only on AOSP source code, forgoing the Android trademark: Thailand (44%), Philippines (38%), Indonesia (31%), India (21%), Malaysia (24%), Mexico (18%), Brazil (9%).


title: Android (operating system)

text: According to a January 2015 Gartner report, "Android surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014, and will continue to grow at a double-digit pace in 2015, with a 26 percent increase year over year." This made it the first time that any general-purpose operating system has reached more than one billion end users within a year: by reaching close to 1.16 billion end users in 2014, Android shipped over four times more than iOS and OS X combined, and over three times more than Microsoft Windows. Gartner expected the whole mobile phone market to "reach two billion units in 2016", including Android. Describing the statistics, Farhad Manjoo wrote in "The New York Times" that "About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. [It] has become Earth's dominant computing platform."


title: Android (operating system)

text: According to a Statistica's estimate, Android smartphones had an installed base of 1.8 billion units in 2015, which was 76% of the estimated total number of smartphones worldwide. Android has the largest installed base of any mobile operating system and, since 2013, the highest-selling operating system overall with sales in 2012, 2013 and 2014 close to the installed base of all PCs.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In the second quarter of 2014, Android's share of the global smartphone shipment market was 84.7%, a new record. This had grown to 87.5% worldwide market share by the third quarter of 2016, leaving main competitor iOS with 12.1% market share.


title: Android (operating system)

text: According to an April 2017 StatCounter report, Android overtook Microsoft Windows to become the most popular operating system for total Internet usage. It has maintained the plurality since then.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In September 2015, Google announced that Android had 1.4 billion monthly active users. This changed to 2 billion monthly active users in May 2017.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Despite its success on smartphones, initially Android tablet adoption was slow, then later caught up with the iPad, in most countries. One of the main causes was the chicken or the egg situation where consumers were hesitant to buy an Android tablet due to a lack of high quality tablet applications, but developers were hesitant to spend time and resources developing tablet applications until there was a significant market for them. The content and app "ecosystem" proved more important than hardware specs as the selling point for tablets. Due to the lack of Android tablet-specific applications in 2011, early Android tablets had to make do with existing smartphone applications that were ill-suited to larger screen sizes, whereas the dominance of Apple's iPad was reinforced by the large number of tablet-specific iOS applications.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Despite app support in its infancy, a considerable number of Android tablets, like the Barnes & Noble Nook (alongside those using other operating systems, such as the HP TouchPad and BlackBerry PlayBook) were rushed out to market in an attempt to capitalize on the success of the iPad. "InfoWorld" has suggested that some Android manufacturers initially treated their first tablets as a "Frankenphone business", a short-term low-investment opportunity by placing a smartphone-optimized Android OS (before Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" for tablets was available) on a device while neglecting user interface. This approach, such as with the Dell Streak, failed to gain market traction with consumers as well as damaging the early reputation of Android tablets. Furthermore, several Android tablets such as the Motorola Xoom were priced the same or higher than the iPad, which hurt sales. An exception was the Amazon Kindle Fire, which relied upon lower pricing as well as access to Amazon's ecosystem of applications and content.


title: Android (operating system)

text: This began to change in 2012, with the release of the affordable Nexus 7 and a push by Google for developers to write better tablet applications. According to International Data Corporation, shipments of Android-powered tablets surpassed iPads in Q3 2012.


title: Android (operating system)

text: As of the end of 2013, over 191.6 million Android tablets had sold in three years since 2011. This made Android tablets the most-sold type of tablet in 2013, surpassing iPads in the second quarter of 2013.


title: Android (operating system)

text: According to StatCounter's web use statistics, , Android tablets represent the majority of tablet devices used in Africa (70%), South America (65%), while less than half elsewhere, e.g. Europe (44%), Asia (44%), North America (34%) and Oceania/Australia (18%). There are countries on all continents where Android tablets are the majority, for example, Mexico.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In March 2016, Galen Gruman of "InfoWorld" stated that Android devices could be a "real part of your business [..] there's no longer a reason to keep Android at arm's length. It can now be as integral to your mobile portfolio as Apple's iOS devices are". A year earlier, Gruman had stated that Microsoft's own mobile Office apps were "better on iOS and Android" than on Microsoft's own Windows 10 devices.


title: Android (operating system)

text: The recently released Android 12 is the most popular Android version on both smartphones and tablets.


title: Android (operating system)

text: , Android 12 is most popular on smartphones at 30%. Usage of Android 10 and newer, i.e. supported versions, is at 75%, the rest of users are not supported with security updates. Android 12 is most popular in a few countries including the United States, but Android 11 is most used in most countries, including India, while in many others, including China, Android 10 is the most popular version.


title: Android (operating system)

text: On tablets, Android 12 is most popular at 19% Android 11 is 2nd almost even with it, and it overtook Android 9.0 Pie in July 2021, which is now third at 17% (topped out at over 20%). Usage of Android 10 and newer, i.e. supported versions, is at 43% on Android tablets, with Pie 9.O, until recently supported, at 60%. The usage share varies a lot by country: e.g. Android 9.0 Pie is the version with the greatest usage share in the United States (also in the UK) at 34%, while Android 11 is also very popular e.g. most used in India, Canada, Australia, and most European countries, and others all over the world; Oreo 8.1 most used in China.


title: Android (operating system)

text: , 66% of devices have Vulkan support (47% on newer Vulkan 1.1), the successor to OpenGL. At the same time 91.5% of the devices have support for or higher (in addition, the rest of devices, 8.50%, use version 2.0), with 73.50% using the latest version .


title: Android (operating system)

text: In general, paid Android applications can easily be pirated. In a May 2012 interview with Eurogamer, the developers of "Football Manager" stated that the ratio of pirated players vs legitimate players was 9:1 for their game "Football Manager Handheld". However, not every developer agreed that piracy rates were an issue; for example, in July 2012 the developers of the game "Wind-up Knight" said that piracy levels of their game were only 12%, and most of the piracy came from China, where people cannot purchase apps from Google Play.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In 2010, Google released a tool for validating authorized purchases for use within apps, but developers complained that this was insufficient and trivial to crack. Google responded that the tool, especially its initial release, was intended as a sample framework for developers to modify and build upon depending on their needs, not as a finished piracy solution. Android "Jelly Bean" introduced the ability for paid applications to be encrypted, so that they may work only on the device for which they were purchased.


title: Android (operating system)

text: The success of Android has made it a target for patent and copyright litigation between technology companies, both Android and Android phone manufacturers having been involved in numerous patent lawsuits and other legal challenges.


title: Android (operating system)

text: On August 12, 2010, Oracle sued Google over claimed infringement of copyrights and patents related to the Java programming language. Oracle originally sought damages up to $6.1 billion, but this valuation was rejected by a United States federal judge who asked Oracle to revise the estimate. In response, Google submitted multiple lines of defense, counterclaiming that Android did not infringe on Oracle's patents or copyright, that Oracle's patents were invalid, and several other defenses. They said that Android's Java runtime environment is based on Apache Harmony, a clean room implementation of the Java class libraries, and an independently developed virtual machine called Dalvik. In May 2012, the jury in this case found that Google did not infringe on Oracle's patents, and the trial judge ruled that the structure of the Java APIs used by Google was not copyrightable. The parties agreed to zero dollars in statutory damages for a small amount of copied code. On May 9, 2014, the Federal Circuit partially reversed the district court ruling, ruling in Oracle's favor on the copyrightability issue, and remanding the issue of fair use to the district court.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In December 2015, Google announced that the next major release of Android (Android Nougat) would switch to OpenJDK, which is the official open-source implementation of the Java platform, instead of using the now-discontinued Apache Harmony project as its runtime. Code reflecting this change was also posted to the AOSP source repository. In its announcement, Google claimed this was part of an effort to create a "common code base" between Java on Android and other platforms. Google later admitted in a court filing that this was part of an effort to address the disputes with Oracle, as its use of OpenJDK code is governed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) with a linking exception, and that "any damages claim associated with the new versions expressly licensed by Oracle under OpenJDK would require a separate analysis of damages from earlier releases". In June 2016, a United States federal court ruled in favor of Google, stating that its use of the APIs was fair use.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In April 2021, the United Supreme Court ruled that Google's use of the Java APIs was within the bounds of fair use, reversing the Federal Circuit Appeals Court ruling and remanding the case for further hearing. The majority opinion began with the assumption that the APIs may be copyrightable, and thus proceeded with a review of the factors that contributed to fair use.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In 2013, FairSearch, a lobbying organization supported by Microsoft, Oracle and others, filed a complaint regarding Android with the European Commission, alleging that its free-of-charge distribution model constituted anti-competitive predatory pricing. The Free Software Foundation Europe, whose donors include Google, disputed the Fairsearch allegations. On April 20, 2016, the EU filed a formal antitrust complaint against Google based upon the FairSearch allegations, arguing that its leverage over Android vendors, including the mandatory bundling of the entire suite of proprietary Google software, hindering the ability for competing search providers to be integrated into Android, and barring vendors from producing devices running forks of Android, constituted anti-competitive practices. In August 2016, Google was fined US$6.75 million by the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) under similar allegations by Yandex. The European Commission issued its decision on July 18, 2018, determining that Google had conducted three operations related to Android that were in violation of antitrust regulations: bundling Google's search and Chrome as part of Android, blocking phone manufacturers from using forked versions of Android, and establishing deals with phone manufacturers and network providers to exclusively bundle the Google search application on handsets (a practice Google ended by 2014). The EU fined Google for (about ) and required the company to end this conduct within 90 days. Google filed its appeal of the ruling in October 2018, though will not ask for any interim measures to delay the onset of conduct requirements.


title: Android (operating system)

text: On October 16, 2018, Google announced that it would change its distribution model for Google Mobile Services in the EU, since part of its revenues streams for Android which came through use of Google Search and Chrome were now prohibited by the EU's ruling. While the core Android system remains free, OEMs in Europe would be required to purchase a paid license to the core suite of Google applications, such as Gmail, Google Maps and the Google Play Store. Google Search will be licensed separately, with an option to include Google Chrome at no additional cost atop Search. European OEMs can bundle third-party alternatives on phones and devices sold to customers, if they so choose. OEMs will no longer be barred from selling any device running incompatible versions of Android in Europe.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In addition to lawsuits against Google directly, various proxy wars have been waged against Android indirectly by targeting manufacturers of Android devices, with the effect of discouraging manufacturers from adopting the platform by increasing the costs of bringing an Android device to market. Both Apple and Microsoft have sued several manufacturers for patent infringement, with Apple's ongoing legal action against Samsung being a particularly high-profile case. In January 2012, Microsoft said they had signed patent license agreements with eleven Android device manufacturers, whose products account for "70 percent of all Android smartphones" sold in the US and 55% of the worldwide revenue for Android devices. These include Samsung and HTC. Samsung's patent settlement with Microsoft included an agreement to allocate more resources to developing and marketing phones running Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. Microsoft has also tied its own Android software to patent licenses, requiring the bundling of Microsoft Office Mobile and Skype applications on Android devices to subsidize the licensing fees, while at the same time helping to promote its software lines.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Google has publicly expressed its frustration for the current patent landscape in the United States, accusing Apple, Oracle and Microsoft of trying to take down Android through patent litigation, rather than innovating and competing with better products and services. In August 2011, Google purchased Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion, which was viewed in part as a defensive measure to protect Android, since Motorola Mobility held more than 17,000 patents. In December 2011, Google bought over a thousand patents from IBM.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Turkey's competition authority investigations about default search engine in Android, started in 2017, led to a US$17.4 million fine in September 2018 and a fine of 0.05 percent of Google's revenue per day in November 2019 when Google didn't meet the requirements. In December 2019, Google stopped issuing licenses for new Android phone models sold in Turkey.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Google has developed several variations of Android for specific use cases, including Android Wear, later renamed Wear OS, for wearable devices such as wrist watches, Android TV for televisions, Android Things for smart or Internet of things devices and Android Automotive for cars. Additionally, by providing infrastructure that combines dedicated hardware and dedicated applications running on regular Android, Google have opened up the platform for its use in particular usage scenarios, such as the Android Auto app for cars, and Daydream, a Virtual Reality platform.


title: Android (operating system)

text: The open and customizable nature of Android allows device makers to use it on other electronics as well, including laptops, netbooks, and desktop computers, cameras, headphones, home automation systems, game consoles, media players, satellites, routers, printers, payment terminals, automated teller machines, and robots. Additionally, Android has been installed and run on a variety of less-technical objects, including calculators, single-board computers, feature phones, electronic dictionaries, alarm clocks, refrigerators, landline telephones, coffee machines, bicycles, and mirrors.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Ouya, a video game console running Android, became one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns, crowdfunding US$8.5m for its development, and was later followed by other Android-based consoles, such as Nvidia's Shield Portable an Android device in a video game controller form factor.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In 2011, Google demonstrated "Android@Home", a home automation technology which uses Android to control a range of household devices including light switches, power sockets and thermostats. Prototype light bulbs were announced that could be controlled from an Android phone or tablet, but Android head Andy Rubin was cautious to note that "turning a lightbulb on and off is nothing new", pointing to numerous failed home automation services. Google, he said, was thinking more ambitiously and the intention was to use their position as a cloud services provider to bring Google products into customers' homes.


title: Android (operating system)

text: Parrot unveiled an Android-based car stereo system known as Asteroid in 2011, followed by a successor, the touchscreen-based Asteroid Smart, in 2012. In 2013, Clarion released its own Android-based car stereo, the AX1. In January 2014, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Google announced the formation of the Open Automotive Alliance, a group including several major automobile makers (Audi, General Motors, Hyundai, and Honda) and Nvidia, which aims to produce Android-based in-car entertainment systems for automobiles, "[bringing] the best of Android into the automobile in a safe and seamless way."


title: Android (operating system)

text: Android comes preinstalled on a few laptops (a similar functionality of running Android applications is also available in Google's ChromeOS) and can also be installed on personal computers by end users. On those platforms Android provides additional functionality for physical keyboards and mice, together with the "Alt-Tab" key combination for switching applications quickly with a keyboard. In December 2014, one reviewer commented that Android's notification system is "vastly more complete and robust than in most environments" and that Android is "absolutely usable" as one's primary desktop operating system.


title: Android (operating system)

text: In October 2015, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that Android will serve as Google's future main laptop operating system, with the plan to fold ChromeOS into it by 2017. Google's Sundar Pichai, who led the development of Android, explained that "mobile as a computing paradigm is eventually going to blend with what we think of as desktop today." Also, back in 2009, Google co-founder Sergey Brin himself said that ChromeOS and Android would "likely converge over time." Lockheimer, who replaced Pichai as head of Android and ChromeOS, responded to this claim with an official Google blog post stating that "While we've been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there's no plan to phase out ChromeOS [which has] guaranteed auto-updates for five years". That is unlike Android where support is shorter with "EOL dates [being..] at least 3 years [into the future] for Android tablets for education".


title: Android (operating system)

text: At Google I/O in May 2016, Google announced Daydream, a virtual reality platform that relies on a smartphone and provides VR capabilities through a virtual reality headset and controller designed by Google itself. The platform is built into Android starting with Android Nougat, differentiating from standalone support for VR capabilities. The software is available for developers, and was released in 2016.


title: Android (operating system)

text: The mascot of Android is a green android robot, as related to the software's name. Although it has no official name, the Android team at Google reportedly call it "Bugdroid".


title: Android (operating system)

text: It was designed by then-Google graphic designer Irina Blok on November 5, 2007, when Android was announced. Contrary to reports that she was tasked with a project to create an icon, Blok confirmed in an interview that she independently developed it and made it open source. The robot design was initially not presented to Google, but it quickly became commonplace in the Android development team, with various variations of it created by the developers there who liked the figure, as it was free under a Creative Commons license. Its popularity amongst the development team eventually led to Google adopting it as an official icon as part of the Android logo when it launched to consumers in 2008.


title: English language

text: English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. English is genealogically West Germanic, closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages; however, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of French (about 29% of modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones.


title: English language

text: The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th centuries. Middle English began in the late 11th century after the Norman conquest of England, when considerable French (especially Old Norman) and Latin-derived vocabulary was incorporated into English over some three hundred years. Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the start of the Great Vowel Shift and the Renaissance trend of borrowing further Latin and Greek words and roots into English, concurrent with the introduction of the printing press to London. This era notably culminated in the King James Bible and plays of William Shakespeare.


title: English language

text: Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent-marking pattern, with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, and a fairly fixed subject–verb–object word order. Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation.


title: English language

text: Modern English has spread around the world since the 17th century as a consequence of the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States of America. Through all types of printed and electronic media of these countries, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the "lingua franca" in many regions and professional contexts such as science, navigation and law. English is the most spoken language in the world and the third-most spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish. It is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states. There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers. , it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English. English is the majority native language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland (see Anglosphere), and is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union and many other world and regional international organisations. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch.


title: English language

text: English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, whose languages gradually evolved into the Anglic languages in the British Isles, and into the Frisian languages and Low German/Low Saxon on the continent. The Frisian languages, which together with the Anglic languages form the Anglo-Frisian languages, are the closest living relatives of English. Low German/Low Saxon is also closely related, and sometimes English, the Frisian languages, and Low German are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic) languages, though this grouping remains debated. Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern English. Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other Anglic languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy (Yola) dialects of Ireland.


title: English language

text: Like Icelandic and Faroese, the development of English in the British Isles isolated it from the continental Germanic languages and influences, and it has since diverged considerably. English is not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic language, differing in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, although some of these, such as Dutch or Frisian, do show strong affinities with English, especially with its earlier stages.


title: English language

text: Unlike Icelandic and Faroese, which were isolated, the development of English was influenced by a long series of invasions of the British Isles by other peoples and languages, particularly Old Norse and Norman French. These left a profound mark of their own on the language, so that English shows some similarities in vocabulary and grammar with many languages outside its linguistic clades—but it is not mutually intelligible with any of those languages either. Some scholars have argued that English can be considered a mixed language or a creole—a theory called the Middle English creole hypothesis. Although the great influence of these languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed language.


title: English language

text: English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German, and Swedish. These shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor called Proto-Germanic. Some shared features of Germanic languages include the division of verbs into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs, and the sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants, known as Grimm's and Verner's laws. English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic (see ).


title: English language

text: The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c. year 550–1066). Old English developed from a set of West Germanic dialects, often grouped as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic, and originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony and southern Jutland by Germanic peoples known to the historical record as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as the Roman economy and administration collapsed. By the 7th century, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in Britain, replacing the languages of Roman Britain (43–409): Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, and Latin, brought to Britain by the Roman occupation. "England" and "English" (originally and ) are named after the Angles.


title: English language

text: Old English was divided into four dialects: the Anglian dialects (Mercian and Northumbrian) and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the 9th century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety. The epic poem "Beowulf" is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, "Cædmon's Hymn", is written in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the early period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the 6th century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms. It included the runic letters "wynn" and "thorn" , and the modified Latin letters "eth" , and "ash" .


title: English language

text: Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English. Modern English has case forms in pronouns ("he", "him", "his") and has a few verb inflections ("speak", "speaks", "speaking", "spoke", "spoken"), but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings. Its closest relative is Old Frisian, but even some centuries after the Anglo-Saxon migration, Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility with other Germanic varieties. Even in the 9th and 10th centuries, amidst the Danelaw and other Viking invasions, there is historical evidence that Old Norse and Old English retained considerable mutual intelligibility. Theoretically, as late as the 900s AD, a commoner from England could hold a conversation with a commoner from Scandinavia. Research continues into the details of the myriad tribes in peoples in England and Scandinavia and the mutual contacts between them.


title: English language

text: The translation of Matthew 8:20 from 1000 shows examples of case endings (nominative plural, accusative plural, genitive singular) and a verb ending (present plural):


title: English language

text: From the 8th to the 12th century, Old English gradually transformed through language contact into Middle English. Middle English is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, but it developed further in the period from 1200 to 1450.


title: English language

text: First, the waves of Norse colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English into intense contact with Old Norse, a North Germanic language. Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in the Danelaw area around York, which was the centre of Norse colonisation; today these features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English. However the centre of norsified English seems to have been in the Midlands around Lindsey, and after 920 CE when Lindsey was reincorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity, Norse features spread from there into English varieties that had not been in direct contact with Norse speakers. An element of Norse influence that persists in all English varieties today is the group of pronouns beginning with "th-" ("they, them, their") which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with ().


title: English language

text: With the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the now norsified Old English language was subject to contact with Old French, in particular with the Old Norman dialect. The Norman language in England eventually developed into Anglo-Norman. Because Norman was spoken primarily by the elites and nobles, while the lower classes continued speaking Anglo-Saxon (English), the main influence of Norman was the introduction of a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains. Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar. The distinction between nominative and accusative cases was lost except in personal pronouns, the instrumental case was dropped, and the use of the genitive case was limited to indicating possession. The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms, and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible. In the Wycliffe Bible of the 1380s, the verse Matthew 8:20 was written: Here the plural suffix on the verb "have" is still retained, but none of the case endings on the nouns are present. By the 12th century Middle English was fully developed, integrating both Norse and French features; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early Modern English around 1500. Middle English literature includes Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", and Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur". In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.


title: English language

text: The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English (1500–1700). Early Modern English was characterised by the Great Vowel Shift (1350–1700), inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation.


title: English language

text: The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English. It was a chain shift, meaning that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. Mid and open vowels were raised, and close vowels were broken into diphthongs. For example, the word "bite" was originally pronounced as the word "beet" is today, and the second vowel in the word "about" was pronounced as the word "boot" is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages.


title: English language

text: English began to rise in prestige, relative to Norman French, during the reign of Henry V. Around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents, and a new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard, developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands. In 1476, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England and began publishing the first printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English. Literature from the Early Modern period includes the works of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I. Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the consonant clusters in "knight", "gnat", and "sword" were still pronounced. Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic represent the distinct characteristics of Early Modern English.


title: English language

text: In the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, written in Early Modern English, Matthew 8:20 says, "The Foxes haue holes and the birds of the ayre haue nests." This exemplifies the loss of case and its effects on sentence structure (replacement with subject–verb–object word order, and the use of "of" instead of the non-possessive genitive), and the introduction of loanwords from French ("ayre") and word replacements ("bird" originally meaning "nestling" had replaced OE "fugol").


title: English language

text: By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language. English also facilitated worldwide international communication. England continued to form new colonies, and these later developed their own norms for speech and writing. English was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly independent nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others. In the 20th century the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC and other broadcasters, caused the language to spread across the planet much faster. In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.


title: English language

text: As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published, and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his "A Dictionary of the English Language", which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms. In 1828, Noah Webster published the "American Dictionary of the English language" to try to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.


title: English language

text: In modern English, the loss of grammatical case is almost complete (it is now only found in pronouns, such as "he" and "him", "she" and "her", "who" and "whom"), and SVO word order is mostly fixed. Some changes, such as the use of do-support, have become universalised. (Earlier English did not use the word "do" as a general auxiliary as Modern English does; at first it was only used in question constructions, and even then was not obligatory. Now, do-support with the verb "have" is becoming increasingly standardised.) The use of progressive forms in "-ing", appears to be spreading to new constructions, and forms such as "had been being built" are becoming more common. Regularisation of irregular forms also slowly continues (e.g. "dreamed" instead of "dreamt"), and analytical alternatives to inflectional forms are becoming more common (e.g. "more polite" instead of "politer"). British English is also undergoing change under the influence of American English, fuelled by the strong presence of American English in the media and the prestige associated with the US as a world power.


title: English language

text: , 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is the largest language by number of speakers. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans.


title: English language

text: The countries where English is spoken can be grouped into different categories according to how English is used in each country. The "inner circle" countries with many native speakers of English share an international standard of written English and jointly influence speech norms for English around the world. English does not belong to just one country, and it does not belong solely to descendants of English settlers. English is an official language of countries populated by few descendants of native speakers of English. It has also become by far the most important language of international communication when people who share no native language meet anywhere in the world.


title: English language

text: The Indian linguist Braj Kachru distinguished countries where English is spoken with a three circles model. In his model,


title: English language

text: Kachru based his model on the history of how English spread in different countries, how users acquire English, and the range of uses English has in each country. The three circles change membership over time.


title: English language

text: Countries with large communities of native speakers of English (the inner circle) include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English. The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the United States (at least 231 million), the United Kingdom (60 million), Canada (19 million), Australia (at least 17 million), South Africa (4.8 million), Ireland (4.2 million), and New Zealand (3.7 million). In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents, and local people who speak other languages and new immigrants learn English to communicate in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. The inner-circle countries provide the base from which English spreads to other countries in the world.


title: English language

text: Estimates of the numbers of second language and foreign-language English speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1 billion, depending on how proficiency is defined. Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. In Kachru's three-circles model, the "outer circle" countries are countries such as the Philippines, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia and Nigeria with a much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English as a second language for education, government, or domestic business, and its routine use for school instruction and official interactions with the government.


title: English language

text: Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English as they grow up through day-to-day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by non-native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries, and they may show grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.


title: English language

text: In the three-circles model, countries such as Poland, China, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries where English is taught as a foreign language, make up the "expanding circle". The distinctions between English as a first language, as a second language, and as a foreign language are often debatable and may change in particular countries over time. For example, in the Netherlands and some other countries of Europe, knowledge of English as a second language is nearly universal, with over 80 percent of the population able to use it, and thus English is routinely used to communicate with foreigners and often in higher education. In these countries, although English is not used for government business, its widespread use puts them at the boundary between the "outer circle" and "expanding circle". English is unusual among world languages in how many of its users are not native speakers but speakers of English as a second or foreign language.


title: English language

text: Many users of English in the expanding circle use it to communicate with other people from the expanding circle, so that interaction with native speakers of English plays no part in their decision to use the language. Non-native varieties of English are widely used for international communication, and speakers of one such variety often encounter features of other varieties. Very often today a conversation in English anywhere in the world may include no native speakers of English at all, even while including speakers from several different countries. This is particularly true of the shared vocabulary of mathematics and the sciences.


title: English language

text: English is a pluricentric language, which means that no one national authority sets the standard for use of the language. Spoken English, for example English used in broadcasting, generally follows national pronunciation standards that are also established by custom rather than by regulation. International broadcasters are usually identifiable as coming from one country rather than another through their accents, but newsreader scripts are also composed largely in international standard written English. The norms of standard written English are maintained purely by the consensus of educated English-speakers around the world, without any oversight by any government or international organisation.


title: English language

text: American listeners generally readily understand most British broadcasting, and British listeners readily understand most American broadcasting. Most English speakers around the world can understand radio programmes, television programmes, and films from many parts of the English-speaking world. Both standard and non-standard varieties of English can include both formal or informal styles, distinguished by word choice and syntax and use both technical and non-technical registers.


title: English language

text: The settlement history of the English-speaking inner circle countries outside Britain helped level dialect distinctions and produce koineised forms of English in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The majority of immigrants to the United States without British ancestry rapidly adopted English after arrival. Now the majority of the United States population are monolingual English speakers, and English has been given official or co-official status by 30 of the 50 state governments, as well as all five territorial governments of the US, though there has never been an official language at the federal level.


title: English language

text: English has ceased to be an "English language" in the sense of belonging only to people who are ethnically English. Use of English is growing country-by-country internally and for international communication. Most people learn English for practical rather than ideological reasons. Many speakers of English in Africa have become part of an "Afro-Saxon" language community that unites Africans from different countries.


title: English language

text: As decolonisation proceeded throughout the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, former colonies often did not reject English but rather continued to use it as independent countries setting their own language policies. For example, the view of the English language among many Indians has gone from associating it with colonialism to associating it with economic progress, and English continues to be an official language of India. English is also widely used in media and literature, and the number of English language books published annually in India is the third largest in the world after the US and UK. However English is rarely spoken as a first language, numbering only around a couple hundred-thousand people, and less than 5% of the population speak fluent English in India. David Crystal claimed in 2004 that, combining native and non-native speakers, India now has more people who speak or understand English than any other country in the world, but the number of English speakers in India is uncertain, with most scholars concluding that the United States still has more speakers of English than India.


title: English language

text: Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca, is also regarded as the first world language. English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. English is, by international treaty, the basis for the required controlled natural languages Seaspeak and Airspeak, used as international languages of seafaring and aviation. English used to have parity with French and German in scientific research, but now it dominates that field. It achieved parity with French as a language of diplomacy at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919. By the time of the foundation of the United Nations at the end of World War II, English had become pre-eminent and is now the main worldwide language of diplomacy and international relations. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Many other worldwide international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee, specify English as a working language or official language of the organisation.


title: English language

text: Many regional international organisations such as the European Free Trade Association, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) set English as their organisation's sole working language even though most members are not countries with a majority of native English speakers. While the European Union (EU) allows member states to designate any of the national languages as an official language of the Union, in practice English is the main working language of EU organisations.


title: English language

text: Although in most countries English is not an official language, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language. In the countries of the EU, English is the most widely spoken foreign language in nineteen of the twenty-five member states where it is not an official language (that is, the countries other than Ireland and Malta). In a 2012 official Eurobarometer poll (conducted when the UK was still a member of the EU), 38 percent of the EU respondents outside the countries where English is an official language said they could speak English well enough to have a conversation in that language. The next most commonly mentioned foreign language, French (which is the most widely known foreign language in the UK and Ireland), could be used in conversation by 12 percent of respondents.


title: English language

text: A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine and computing. English has become so important in scientific publishing that more than 80 percent of all scientific journal articles indexed by "Chemical Abstracts" in 1998 were written in English, as were 90 percent of all articles in natural science publications by 1996 and 82 percent of articles in humanities publications by 1995.


title: English language

text: International communities such as international business people may use English as an auxiliary language, with an emphasis on vocabulary suitable for their domain of interest. This has led some scholars to develop the study of English as an auxiliary language. The trademarked Globish uses a relatively small subset of English vocabulary (about 1500 words, designed to represent the highest use in international business English) in combination with the standard English grammar. Other examples include Simple English.


title: English language

text: The increased use of the English language globally has had an effect on other languages, leading to some English words being assimilated into the vocabularies of other languages. This influence of English has led to concerns about language death, and to claims of linguistic imperialism, and has provoked resistance to the spread of English; however the number of speakers continues to increase because many people around the world think that English provides them with opportunities for better employment and improved lives.


title: English language

text: Although some scholars mention a possibility of future divergence of English dialects into mutually unintelligible languages, most think a more likely outcome is that English will continue to function as a koineised language in which the standard form unifies speakers from around the world. English is used as the language for wider communication in countries around the world. Thus English has grown in worldwide use much more than any constructed language proposed as an international auxiliary language, including Esperanto.


title: English language

text: The phonetics and phonology of the English language differ from one dialect to another, usually without interfering with mutual communication. Phonological variation affects the inventory of phonemes (i.e. speech sounds that distinguish meaning), and phonetic variation consists in differences in pronunciation of the phonemes. This overview mainly describes the standard pronunciations of the United Kingdom and the United States: Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA). (See , below.)


title: English language

text: Most English dialects share the same 24consonant phonemes. The consonant inventory shown below is valid for California English, and for RP.


title: English language

text: In the table, when obstruents (stops, affricates, and fricatives) appear in pairs, such as , , and , the first is fortis (strong) and the second is lenis (weak). Fortis obstruents, such as are pronounced with more muscular tension and breath force than lenis consonants, such as , and are always voiceless. Lenis consonants are partly voiced at the beginning and end of utterances, and fully voiced between vowels. Fortis stops such as have additional articulatory or acoustic features in most dialects: they are aspirated when they occur alone at the beginning of a stressed syllable, often unaspirated in other cases, and often unreleased or pre-glottalised at the end of a syllable. In a single-syllable word, a vowel before a fortis stop is shortened: thus "nip" has a noticeably shorter vowel (phonetically, but not phonemically) than "nib" (see below).


title: English language

text: In RP, the lateral approximant , has two main allophones (pronunciation variants): the clear or plain , as in "light", and the dark or velarised , as in "full". GA has dark "l" in most cases.


title: English language

text: All sonorants (liquids and nasals ) devoice when following a voiceless obstruent, and they are syllabic when following a consonant at the end of a word.


title: English language

text: The pronunciation of vowels varies a great deal between dialects and is one of the most detectable aspects of a speaker's accent. The table below lists the vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA), with examples of words in which they occur from lexical sets compiled by linguists. The vowels are represented with symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet; those given for RP are standard in British dictionaries and other publications.


title: English language

text: In RP, vowel length is phonemic; long vowels are marked with a triangular colon in the table above, such as the vowel of "need" as opposed to "bid" . In GA, vowel length is non-distinctive.


title: English language

text: In both RP and GA, vowels are phonetically shortened before fortis consonants in the same syllable, like , but not before lenis consonants like or in open syllables: thus, the vowels of "rich" , "neat" , and "safe" are noticeably shorter than the vowels of "ridge" , "need" , and "save" , and the vowel of "light" is shorter than that of "lie" . Because lenis consonants are frequently voiceless at the end of a syllable, vowel length is an important cue as to whether the following consonant is lenis or fortis.


title: English language

text: The vowel only occurs in unstressed syllables and is more open in quality in stem-final positions. Some dialects do not contrast and in unstressed positions, so that "rabbit" and "abbot" rhyme and "Lenin" and "Lennon" are homophonous, a dialect feature called weak vowel merger. GA and are realised as an "r"-coloured vowel , as in "further" (phonemically ), which in RP is realised as (phonemically ).


title: English language

text: An English syllable includes a syllable nucleus consisting of a vowel sound. Syllable onset and coda (start and end) are optional. A syllable can start with up to three consonant sounds, as in "sprint" , and end with up to five, as in (for some dialects) "angsts" . This gives an English syllable the following structure, (CCC)V(CCCCC), where C represents a consonant and V a vowel; the word "strengths" is thus close to the most complex syllable possible in English. The consonants that may appear together in onsets or codas are restricted, as is the order in which they may appear. Onsets can only have four types of consonant clusters: a stop and approximant, as in "play"; a voiceless fricative and approximant, as in "fly" or "sly"; "s" and a voiceless stop, as in "stay"; and "s", a voiceless stop, and an approximant, as in "string". Clusters of nasal and stop are only allowed in codas. Clusters of obstruents always agree in voicing, and clusters of sibilants and of plosives with the same point of articulation are prohibited. Furthermore, several consonants have limited distributions: can only occur in syllable-initial position, and only in syllable-final position.


title: English language

text: Stress plays an important role in English. Certain syllables are stressed, while others are unstressed. Stress is a combination of duration, intensity, vowel quality, and sometimes changes in pitch. Stressed syllables are pronounced longer and louder than unstressed syllables, and vowels in unstressed syllables are frequently reduced while vowels in stressed syllables are not. Some words, primarily short function words but also some modal verbs such as "can", have weak and strong forms depending on whether they occur in stressed or non-stressed position within a sentence.


title: English language

text: Stress in English is phonemic, and some pairs of words are distinguished by stress. For instance, the word "contract" is stressed on the first syllable ( ) when used as a noun, but on the last syllable ( ) for most meanings (for example, "reduce in size") when used as a verb. Here stress is connected to vowel reduction: in the noun "contract" the first syllable is stressed and has the unreduced vowel , but in the verb "contract" the first syllable is unstressed and its vowel is reduced to . Stress is also used to distinguish between words and phrases, so that a compound word receives a single stress unit, but the corresponding phrase has two: e.g. "a burnout" () versus "to burn out" (), and "a hotdog" () versus "a hot dog" ().


title: English language

text: In terms of rhythm, English is generally described as a stress-timed language, meaning that the amount of time between stressed syllables tends to be equal. Stressed syllables are pronounced longer, but unstressed syllables (syllables between stresses) are shortened. Vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened as well, and vowel shortening causes changes in vowel quality: vowel reduction.


title: English language

text: Varieties of English vary the most in pronunciation of vowels. The best known national varieties used as standards for education in non-English-speaking countries are British (BrE) and American (AmE). Countries such as Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa have their own standard varieties which are less often used as standards for education internationally. Some differences between the various dialects are shown in the table "Varieties of Standard English and their features".


title: English language

text: English has undergone many historical sound changes, some of them affecting all varieties, and others affecting only a few. Most standard varieties are affected by the Great Vowel Shift, which changed the pronunciation of long vowels, but a few dialects have slightly different results. In North America, a number of chain shifts such as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and Canadian Shift have produced very different vowel landscapes in some regional accents.


title: English language

text: Some dialects have fewer or more consonant phonemes and phones than the standard varieties. Some conservative varieties like Scottish English have a voiceless sound in "whine" that contrasts with the voiced in "wine", but most other dialects pronounce both words with voiced , a dialect feature called "wine"–"whine" merger. The unvoiced velar fricative sound is found in Scottish English, which distinguishes "loch" from "lock" . Accents like Cockney with ""h"-dropping" lack the glottal fricative , and dialects with "th"-stopping and "th"-fronting like African American Vernacular and Estuary English do not have the dental fricatives , but replace them with dental or alveolar stops or labiodental fricatives . Other changes affecting the phonology of local varieties are processes such as "yod"-dropping, "yod"-coalescence, and reduction of consonant clusters.


title: English language

text: General American and Received Pronunciation vary in their pronunciation of historical after a vowel at the end of a syllable (in the syllable coda). GA is a rhotic dialect, meaning that it pronounces at the end of a syllable, but RP is non-rhotic, meaning that it loses in that position. English dialects are classified as rhotic or non-rhotic depending on whether they elide like RP or keep it like GA.


title: English language

text: There is complex dialectal variation in words with the open front and open back vowels . These four vowels are only distinguished in RP, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In GA, these vowels merge to three , and in Canadian English, they merge to two . In addition, the words that have each vowel vary by dialect. The table "Dialects and open vowels" shows this variation with lexical sets in which these sounds occur.


title: English language

text: As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment. Unlike other Indo-European languages though, English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system in favour of analytic constructions. Only the personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class. English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners (including articles), prepositions, and conjunctions. Some analyses add pronouns as a class separate from nouns, and subdivide conjunctions into subordinators and coordinators, and add the class of interjections. English also has a rich set of auxiliary verbs, such as "have" and "do", expressing the categories of mood and aspect. Questions are marked by do-support, wh-movement (fronting of question words beginning with "wh"-) and word order inversion with some verbs.


title: English language

text: Some traits typical of Germanic languages persist in English, such as the distinction between irregularly inflected strong stems inflected through ablaut (i.e. changing the vowel of the stem, as in the pairs "speak/spoke" and "foot/feet") and weak stems inflected through affixation (such as "love/loved", "hand/hands"). Vestiges of the case and gender system are found in the pronoun system ("he/him, who/whom") and in the inflection of the copula verb "to be".


title: English language

text: English nouns are only inflected for number and possession. New nouns can be formed through derivation or compounding. They are semantically divided into proper nouns (names) and common nouns. Common nouns are in turn divided into concrete and abstract nouns, and grammatically into count nouns and mass nouns.


title: English language

text: Most count nouns are inflected for plural number through the use of the plural suffix -"s", but a few nouns have irregular plural forms. Mass nouns can only be pluralised through the use of a count noun classifier, e.g. "one loaf of bread", "two loaves of bread".


title: English language

text: Possession can be expressed either by the possessive enclitic -"s" (also traditionally called a genitive suffix), or by the preposition "of". Historically the -s possessive has been used for animate nouns, whereas the "of" possessive has been reserved for inanimate nouns. Today this distinction is less clear, and many speakers use -"s" also with inanimates. Orthographically the possessive -s is separated from a singular noun with an apostrophe. If the noun is plural formed with -s the apostrophe follows the -s.


title: English language

text: Nouns can form noun phrases (NPs) where they are the syntactic head of the words that depend on them such as determiners, quantifiers, conjunctions or adjectives. Noun phrases can be short, such as "the man", composed only of a determiner and a noun. They can also include modifiers such as adjectives (e.g. "red", "tall", "all") and specifiers such as determiners (e.g. "the", "that"). But they can also tie together several nouns into a single long NP, using conjunctions such as "and", or prepositions such as "with", e.g. "the tall man with the long red trousers and his skinny wife with the spectacles" (this NP uses conjunctions, prepositions, specifiers, and modifiers). Regardless of length, an NP functions as a syntactic unit. For example, the possessive enclitic can, in cases which do not lead to ambiguity, follow the entire noun phrase, as in "The President of India's wife", where the enclitic follows "India" and not "President".


title: English language

text: The class of determiners is used to specify the noun they precede in terms of definiteness, where "the" marks a definite noun and "a" or "an" an indefinite one. A definite noun is assumed by the speaker to be already known by the interlocutor, whereas an indefinite noun is not specified as being previously known. Quantifiers, which include "one", "many", "some" and "all", are used to specify the noun in terms of quantity or number. The noun must agree with the number of the determiner, e.g. "one man" (sg.) but "all men" (pl.). Determiners are the first constituents in a noun phrase.


title: English language

text: Adjectives modify a noun by providing additional information about their referents. In English, adjectives come before the nouns they modify and after determiners. In Modern English, adjectives are not inflected so as to agree in form with the noun they modify, as adjectives in most other Indo-European languages do. For example, in the phrases "the slender boy", and "many slender girls", the adjective "slender" does not change form to agree with either the number or gender of the noun.


title: English language

text: Some adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, with the positive degree unmarked, the suffix "-er" marking the comparative, and "-est" marking the superlative: "a small boy", "the boy is smaller than the girl", "that boy is the smallest". Some adjectives have irregular comparative and superlative forms, such as "good", "better", and "best". Other adjectives have comparatives formed by periphrastic constructions, with the adverb "more" marking the comparative, and "most" marking the superlative: "happier" or "more happy", "the happiest" or "most happy". There is some variation among speakers regarding which adjectives use inflected or periphrastic comparison, and some studies have shown a tendency for the periphrastic forms to become more common at the expense of the inflected form.


title: English language

text: English pronouns conserve many traits of case and gender inflection. The personal pronouns retain a difference between subjective and objective case in most persons ("I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them") as well as an animateness distinction in the third person singular (distinguishing "it" from the three sets of animate third person singular pronouns) and an optional gender distinction in the animate third person singular (distinguishing between "she/her" [feminine], "they/them" [epicene], and "he/him" [masculine]). The subjective case corresponds to the Old English nominative case, and the objective case is used in the sense both of the previous accusative case (for a patient, or direct object of a transitive verb), and of the Old English dative case (for a recipient or indirect object of a transitive verb). The subjective is used when the pronoun is the subject of a finite clause, otherwise the objective is used. While grammarians such as Henry Sweet and Otto Jespersen noted that the English cases did not correspond to the traditional Latin-based system, some contemporary grammars, for example , retain traditional labels for the cases, calling them nominative and accusative cases respectively.


title: English language

text: Possessive pronouns exist in dependent and independent forms; the dependent form functions as a determiner specifying a noun (as in "my chair"), while the independent form can stand alone as if it were a noun (e.g. "the chair is mine"). The English system of grammatical person no longer has a distinction between formal and informal pronouns of address (the old second person singular familiar pronoun "thou" acquired a pejorative or inferior tinge of meaning and was abandoned).


title: English language

text: Pronouns are used to refer to entities deictically or anaphorically. A deictic pronoun points to some person or object by identifying it relative to the speech situation—for example, the pronoun "I" identifies the speaker, and the pronoun "you", the addressee. Anaphoric pronouns such as "that" refer back to an entity already mentioned or assumed by the speaker to be known by the audience, for example in the sentence "I already told you that". The reflexive pronouns are used when the oblique argument is identical to the subject of a phrase (e.g. "he sent it to himself" or "she braced herself for impact").


title: English language

text: Prepositional phrases (PP) are phrases composed of a preposition and one or more nouns, e.g. "with the dog", "for my friend", "to school", "in England". Prepositions have a wide range of uses in English. They are used to describe movement, place, and other relations between different entities, but they also have many syntactic uses such as introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs. For example, in the phrase "I gave it to him", the preposition "to" marks the recipient, or Indirect Object of the verb "to give". Traditionally words were only considered prepositions if they governed the case of the noun they preceded, for example causing the pronouns to use the objective rather than subjective form, "with her", "to me", "for us". But some contemporary grammars such as that of no longer consider government of case to be the defining feature of the class of prepositions, rather defining prepositions as words that can function as the heads of prepositional phrases.


title: English language

text: English verbs are inflected for tense and aspect and marked for agreement with present-tense third-person singular subject. Only the copula verb "to be" is still inflected for agreement with the plural and first and second person subjects. Auxiliary verbs such as "have" and "be" are paired with verbs in the infinitive, past, or progressive forms. They form complex tenses, aspects, and moods. Auxiliary verbs differ from other verbs in that they can be followed by the negation, and in that they can occur as the first constituent in a question sentence.


title: English language

text: Most verbs have six inflectional forms. The primary forms are a plain present, a third-person singular present, and a preterite (past) form. The secondary forms are a plain form used for the infinitive, a gerund-participle and a past participle. The copula verb "to be" is the only verb to retain some of its original conjugation, and takes different inflectional forms depending on the subject. The first-person present-tense form is "am", the third person singular form is "is", and the form "are" is used in the second-person singular and all three plurals. The only verb past participle is "been" and its gerund-participle is "being".


title: English language

text: English has two primary tenses, past (preterite) and non-past. The preterite is inflected by using the preterite form of the verb, which for the regular verbs includes the suffix "-ed", and for the strong verbs either the suffix "-t" or a change in the stem vowel. The non-past form is unmarked except in the third person singular, which takes the suffix "-s".


title: English language

text: English does not have future verb forms. The future tense is expressed periphrastically with one of the auxiliary verbs "will" or "shall". Many varieties also use a near future constructed with the phrasal verb "be going to" ("going-to future").


title: English language

text: Further aspectual distinctions are shown by auxiliary verbs, primarily "have" and "be", which show the contrast between a perfect and non-perfect past tense ("I have run" vs. "I was running"), and compound tenses such as preterite perfect ("I had been running") and present perfect ("I have been running").


title: English language

text: For the expression of mood, English uses a number of modal auxiliaries, such as "can", "may", "will", "shall" and the past tense forms "could", "might", "would", "should". There are also subjunctive and imperative moods, both based on the plain form of the verb (i.e. without the third person singular "-s"), for use in subordinate clauses (e.g. subjunctive: "It is important that he run every day"; imperative "Run!").