Previous: English Grammar
1.1 What is Grammar?
Grammar is the structure and system of a language, generally considered to include syntax and morphology.
Languages started by people making sounds which evolved into words, phrases and sentences. These days, we communicate not with individual words, but with phrases and sentences. Syntax is concerned with the proper arrangement of word order to form phrases, clauses and sentences. Morphology is the study of individual words, their forms, and how the forms change.
All languages change over time. They are never fixed, unless they are the dead languages. Among the modern languages, English is the most vibrant one.
English is the language of international trade, science, aviation, seafaring, diplomacy, tourism, telecommunication, computers, social media and the internet. English has become a global language used not restricted by people who are ethnically English, but by people around the world out of needs. As a result, English is the language most often taught as a foreign language.
In December 2010, a joint Harvard/Google study found that there were 1,022,000 words in English and it was expanding at the rate of 8,500 words per year. This is a good example of how a language changes in time.
And what we call “grammar,” the system or rules of a language, also changes over time.