The history of the English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes who invaded Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. But most of the Celtic speakers were pushed west and north by the invaders – mainly into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into what we now call Old English.
Old English did not sound or look like English today. Native English speakers now would have great difficulty understanding Old English. The Angles and Saxons came from Englaland and their language was called Englisc – from which the words England and English are derived. Initially, Old English, also known as Anglo-Frisian, was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. English changed enormously in the Middle Ages.
Written Old English of 1000 AD is similar in vocabulary and grammar to other old Germanic languages such as Old High German and Old Norse, and completely unintelligible to modern speakers, while the modern language is already largely recognizable in written Middle English of 1400 AD. This was caused by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the French Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman.
The Term Paper on Histroy of English Language
... inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. English belongs, in all its stages, to the Indo European family of languages, formerly called Indo-Germanic, and still ... process might be called adoption, for the speaker does adopt element from a second language into its own. Even though English language has adopted variety ...
About 60% of the modern English vocabulary comes direct from Old French. [1] Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English. However, this had not reached southwest England by the 9th century AD, where Old English was developed into a fully-fledged literary language. This was completely disrupted by the Norman invasion in 1066. Normandy is a region in northern France.
The Norman conquest was a pivotal event in English history. It largely removed the native ruling class, replacing it with a foreign, French-speaking monarchy, aristocracy, and clerical hierarchy. By bringing England under the control of rulers originating in France, the Norman conquest linked the country more closely with continental Europe, lessened Scandinavian influence and brought about a transformation of the English language and the culture of England in a new era often referred to as Norman England.
And when literary English rose anew in the 13th century, it was based on the speech of London, much closer to the center of Scandinavian settlement. Technical and cultural vocabulary was largely derived from Old French, with heavy influence from Norman French in the courts and government. With the coming of the Renaissance, as with most other developing European languages such as German and Dutch, latin and Ancient Greek supplanted French as the main source of new words. Thus, English developed into very much a “borrowing” language with an enormously disparate vocabulary.
