Writing in “the English language”

Speaking “the English language”. Mastery of “the English language”. Um… what’s wrong with just saying “English”?

Or any other language, of course. A trivial but commonplace bit of unnecessary longwindedness that’s easily avoided.

• Phrases like “beheersing van de Nederlandse taal” are common in Dutch and tend to get literally translated
• It’s just simpler to say speaking Japanese, an understanding of German, writing in French, and so forth.

There’s nothing grammatically incorrect about the phrase “the English language”, though.

Prevalence: moderate. When the literal translation is grammatical, people tend not to look any further.
Frequency: low. But a favourite in the curriculum vitae, of course.
Native: sometimes. We can be unnecessarily long-winded too.