I was watching a video linked in this answer and it made the following claim:
[…] like most words in English is derived from German.
That got me thinking. While I know that Germanic languages have greatly influenced English, so have the Latin and Celtic ones (and various others to a greater or lesser degree). Is it true that more than 50% of the English vocabulary is derived from Germanic roots?
More generally, can someone point me to data on this? I imagine attempts have been made to quantify the contribution of different languages to English; what were the results? What percentage of the language comes from each source?
Ideally I would like to see this expressed in terms of % of words but I am aware that, at least to some linguists, attempting to quantify vocabulary is anathema (to give a simple reason, all languages that allow number construction have an infinite vocabulary by definition), so alternative approaches to quantifying this are also welcome.
Best Answer
Wikipedia has the following pie chart showing the word origins:
It shows the breakdown as
It cites some references which back up these numbers but I don't have access to those.
To answer your question, it does not appear to be true that 50% of words are Germanic. However, that probably depends on what your context is. If you exclude scientific, medical, and legal, you will probably find a much lower incidence of Latin words. Given that English is itself a Germanic language, it's more surprising that Germanic doesn't account for MORE of the vocabulary.