This text is about 3 different countries and their relation to English. English is a language you will find in every corner of the world. There are many people in the world with English as their mother tongue, but there is also a massive amount of people around the world that speak English as a second language.

Russia

 Russia has kind of a complicated relationship to English. Mainly after World war 2. Usa’s and Russia’s political views and ideals aren’t exactly the same.

Russian is part of the Slavonic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is closely related to other Slav languages such as Czech and polish. Russian is spoken as a mother tongue by about 150 million people in Russia and the former republics of the USSR. Russian is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, some of whose letters are similar to letters in the Latin alphabet used by English. Russian learners of English may experience initial problems writing in English. Russian has a similar number of consonants to English, but their sounds do not fully overlap. As with many other learners of English, the ‘’w’’ and ‘’v’’ sounds are troublesome. The ng sound at the end of words like sing or thinking is difficult for Russian learners to produce accurately. Due to differences in the phonological systems, it is relatively difficult for Russians to acquire native-speaker-like standards of pronunciation.

Germany

German is spoken by approximately 95 million people around the world and is the official language of Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland. Both English and German belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Because they are so closely related, they share many features. The use of English especially in business in Germany, is widespread enough that it is mandatory in school often from grade 5. So most Germans under about 50 will have had English in school at one point or another. The differences will come in how much they practice it how often they encounter English speakers. Germans as a culture are into travelling, and studying abroad is very common. They are in the middle of Europe with different languages on nearly every side. The more a German has travelled the more likely that their English will be passable.

South Africa

English in South Africa dates back to the arrival of the British at the Cape of Good Hope in 1795. As was the case in most colonies. English was primarily introduced by soldiers and administrators, then by missionaries and settlers.

As a result, English is generally understood across the country, being the language of business, politics and the media, and is regarded as the country's lingua franca. However, it only ranks a joint fifth as a home language.

Because of South Africa’s linguistic diversity. All 11 languages have had a profound effect on each other. South African English, for example, is filled with words and phrases from Afrikaans, isiZulu, Nama, and other African languages. South African English is an established and unique dialect, with strong influences from Afrikaans and the country's many African languages. As a home language, English is most common in Gauteng, where more than a third of all English-speaking South Africans are found.

Here are my sources:

South Africa
Russia
Germany

Here is the link to the video i used in my presentation.