Where did the English Language come from ?
This broad family includes:
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These evolved from a common
This language is divided into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, which evolved
Many people assume that the story of English begins with the Roman occupation in Britain.
However, little Latin entered the language during this period except for some modern place names in England derived from words such as “castra”, meaning “walled encampment,” as in, Manchester, and “wic,” or “village,” as in Greenwich.
The conversion of England later in the 7th century to Christianity after the Roman occupation also brought in many Latin church-related words like “priest,” “vicar,” and “mass.”
The real story of English, however, begins around 500 A.D. when West Germanic invaders began coming into Britain from Jutland, southern Denmark, and western the present-day Netherlands.
These peoples were the Anglos, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, who all spoke a mutually intelligible language that was later to be called Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. This language is similar to modern Frisian, still spoken by approximately400,000 people in western areas of the Netherlands. Frisian is even today the most closely related language to English in the Germanic language family.
Following these early West Germanic invaders came the Vikings, beginning around 850 A.D., who brought with them their North Germanic language influence.
Today, Old English supplies about one-sixth of the total contemporary English vocabulary, but this vocabulary is among the most important that we use.
About half of the most commonly used words today are, in fact, descended from Old English.
Words like "the", "water", "book", "him", "her", "these" and "those” are all descended from Old English and are the core of today's English language.
A pivotal moment for the language came in 1066 A.D. with the Norman Conquest.
The Anglo-Saxons of England were conquered by the French-speaking William, Duke of Normandy, and his Norman forces.
Subsequently, the language of Old English began to evolve with the dramatic influence of the language of the new Norman aristocracy that ruled England, thus ushering in the period of Middle English (approximately 1100 to 1500 A.D.)
Enormous possibilities opened up for the English language as the period saw newly arrived, foreign aristocracy speaking French, while the lower classes continued to speak their native English.
Gradually, the French Latin-based vocabulary began to mix with English, providing a vast new vocabulary, often producing two words to describe one thing.
Beef, pork, and veal were by the French lord, and cow, pig, and calf tended by his English-speaking commoners.
The late modern period of English, from1800 to the present, has been characterized by two historical events: the rise of technology and the growth of the British Empire and its eventual overshadowing by the growth of American influence in the world.
The industrial revolution began in England and reached its height in the United States. As a result, thousands of new words needed to be created to describe new machines, materials, processes and medicines.
Many were created from Latin and Greek, words which didn't exist in the original forms of these languages, such as oxygen, vaccine, and nuclear.
However, frequently, the new words were created from other English words, as in “typewriter," "airplane," and "horsepower".