English grammar is the set of structural rules of the
English language
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 t ...
. This includes the structure of
words,
phrases,
clauses,
sentences, and whole texts.
This article describes a generalized, present-day
Standard English
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public servi ...
– a form of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of
registers, from formal to informal. Divergences from the
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
described here occur in some historical, social, cultural, and regional
varieties of English, although these are more minor than differences in
pronunciation and
vocabulary.
Modern English has largely abandoned the
inflectional
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, an ...
case system of
Indo-European in favor of
analytic constructions. The
personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical functio