Origins of English

Origins of English

The origins of English begin with a major influence from Germanic tribes from Saxon regions. These effectively replaced the Celtic tribes (also originally from Germany) pushing them north to Scotland, west to Wales and Ireland and south-west to Devon and Cornwell.

Anglo-Saxon

The Anglo-Saxon language, sometimes called Old English, was, like German, a high inflected language. There was declension of nouns and adjectives as well as conjugation of verbs. Nearly every word had a special ending to show its grammatical function. Anglo-Saxon

vocabulary absorbed very few words from Celtic languages. More words were adopted from Latin during the 200-year Roman occupation of England and Wales (55 BC – 150 A.D). The

influence from Latin continued with missionaries from Rome spreading the Christian religion. Starting in 787 AD Viking raids brought influence from Norse. The area of England north of

a diagonal line from London to Chester fell under the rule of Denmark which led to further influence from Scandinavian languages.

In 1066 the Norman French armies of King William 1 invaded Britain and quickly gained control of most of England. The Normans brought with them French habits and French language. For some years England was bilingual with the Norman rulers speaking French and the Anglo-Saxon peasants speaking Old English.  This led to the development of Middle English during the 12th century. During the 11th and 12th centuries Old English gradually lost most of its grammatical inflections. A few remained as we can see in the forms of some high frequency irregular verbs [speak / spoke/ /spoken,

write / wrote / written, break / broke / broken], the ‘s’ in 3rd person singular verbs and the ‘Saxon’ genitive (Peter’s).

Gradually, English became a language with largely Latin based vocabulary and a simplified German grammatical system.