THE HISTORY OF THE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Introduction:
English, A language with rather humble roots, one
that has been twisted and bent, that has taken and
borrowed from other languages, and that has been
the subject of much debate as to the correctness
of certain usages, today English is the language
that the world uses to communicate. With over 400
million people around the world speaking English
as their first language, and 1.1 billion speaking it
as a secondary language, it is considered as one
of the most spoken languages globally. Why is
English so popular, though? How has it become a
global language? And where did it originate from?
While it is undeniable that English has become a
world power in terms of communication, we must
understand the history of how it became that way if
we are to ever truly understand why it has become
a global language and how it will continue to be in
the years to come. So, in this paper, I shall try to
answer the questions above, as well as speak of
the history of the English language.
English is a West Germanic language that
originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to
Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries AD by
Germanic invaders and settlers from what is now
northwest Germany, west Denmark and the
Netherlands. The invaders all spoke a language
that was Germanic (related to what emerged as
Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian
languages, and to Gothic), but we'll probably never
know how different their speech was from that of
their continental neighbours. However it is fairly
certain that many of the settlers would have
spoken in exactly the same way as some of their
north European neighbours, and that not all of the
settlers would have spoken in the same way.

Vocabulary came largely from the core Germanic

stock, although due to the Germanic people’s
extensive contacts with the Roman world, the
settlers adopted numerous loanwords from Latin.
For instance, the predecessor of Modern English
wine had been borrowed into early Germanic from
the Latin vinum.
The following table contains other words that
originated from the Latin language as well:
Latin words Definition English
Derivatives
villa villa, house villa, village,
villager
in in in
non not nonfiction,
nonmetal,
nonexistent
aqua water aquatics,
aquarium
bona good bonus
figura figure, shape figure, figurine,
figment
schola school scholar, school

Old English:
Anglo-saxon, or now more commonly called Old
English. It was spoken and written in England
before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English
and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in
the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic
languages. Old English began to appear in writing
during the early 8th century. Most texts were
written in West Saxon, one of the four main
dialects . The other dialects were Northumbrian in
northern England, southeastern Scotland, Mercian
in central England, and Kentish in southeastern
England. Mercian and Northumbrian are often
classed together as the Anglian dialects. The first
great period of literary activity occurred during the
reign of King Alfred the Great in the 9th century.
Old English / Anglo-Saxon was first written with a
version of the Runic alphabet known as Anglo-
Saxon or Anglo-Frisian runes, or futhorc/fuþorc.
This alphabet was a stretched out version of Elder
Futhark with between 26 and 33 letters. Anglo-
Saxon runes were used probably from the 5th
century AD until about the 10th century. They
started to be replaced by the Latin alphabet from
the 7th century, and after the 9th century the runes
were used mainly in manuscripts and were mainly
of interest to antiquarians. Their use ceased not
long after the Norman conquest. Runic inscriptions
are mostly found on jewellery, weapons, stones
and other objects, and only about 200 such
inscriptions have survived. Most have been found
in eastern and southern England.
Anglo-Saxon runes

Old English alphabet

The most famous surviving
work from the Old English
period is the epic poem
Beowulf, composed by an
unknown poet.
In grammar, Old English is
chiefly distinguished from
later stages in the history
of English by greater use
of a larger set of inflections
in verbs, nouns,
adjectives, and pronouns, and also (connected
with this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also
preserves grammatical gender in nouns and
adjectives.
For instance: The following couple of lines from
Ælfric’s De temporibus anni:
‘Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone
wætan to hire neoðan & ða hætan ufan.’
may be translated word-for-word as:
‘Thunder comes from heat and from moisture. The air
draws the moisture to it from below and the heat from
above.’
Middle English:

Middle English is the form of English spoken

roughly from the time of the Norman Conquest in
1066 until the late 15th century.
The conquering Normans were themselves
descended from the Vikings who had settled in
northern France about 200 years before (the very
word Norman comes originally from Norseman).
However, they had completely abandoned their
Old Norse language and wholeheartedly adopted
French (which is a so-called Romance language,
derived originally from the Latin, not Germanic,
branch of Indo-European), to the extent that not a
single Norse word survived in Normandy.
The Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with
considerable Germanic influences, usually called
Anglo-Norman or Norman French, which was quite
different from the standard French of Paris of the
period, which is known as Francien.
For more than 300 years, Anglo-Norman French
became the language of the kings and the upper
class, whereas the commoners and the lower
class (the vast majority of the population, an
estimated 95%) continued to speak English, only
able to communicate slowly and loudly until the
others understood them. And the two languages
developed in parallel, only gradually merging as
Normans and Anglo-Saxons began to intermarry. It
is this mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman
that is usually referred to as Middle English.
Middle English also saw a mass adoption of
Norman French vocabulary, including a huge
number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-
age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and
“-tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”,
“ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Perhaps predictably,
many of them related to matters of crown and
nobility (e.g. crown, castle, prince, count, duke,
viscount, baron, noble, sovereign, heraldry); of
government and administration (e.g. parliament,
government, governor, city); of court and law (e.g.
court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest, sentence,
appeal, condemn, plaintiff, bailiff, jury, felony,
verdict, traitor, contract, damage, prison); of war
and combat (e.g. army, armour, archer, battle,
soldier, guard, courage, peace, enemy, destroy);
of authority and control (e.g. authority, obedience,
servant, peasant, vassal, serf, labourer, charity); of
fashion and high living (e.g. mansion, money,
gown, boot, beauty, mirror, jewel, appetite,
banquet, herb, spice, sauce, roast, biscuit); and of
art and literature (e.g. art, colour, language,
literature, poet, chapter, question). Curiously,
though, the Anglo-Saxon words cyning (king),
cwene (queen), erl (earl), cniht (knight), ladi (lady)
and lord persisted.
While humble trades kept their Anglo-Saxon
names (e.g. baker, miller, shoemaker, etc), the
more skilled trades adopted French names (e.g.
mason, painter, tailor, merchant, etc). While the
animals in the field generally kept their English
names (e.g. sheep, cow, ox, calf, swine, deer),
once cooked and served their names often
became French (e.g. beef, mutton, pork, bacon,
veal, venison, etc). Sometimes a French word
completely replaced an Old English word (e.g.
crime replaced firen, place replaced stow, people
replaced leod, beautiful replaced wlitig, uncle
replaced eam, etc). Sometimes French and Old
English components combined to form a new
word, such as the French gentle and the Germanic
man combined to formed gentleman. Sometimes,
both English and French words survived, but with
significantly different senses (e.g. the Old English
doom and French judgement, hearty and cordial,
house and mansion, etc).
French originated words used in today’s English:
Word Definition

à la carte Literally – on the menu;

in restaurants it refers to
ordering individual
dishes rather than a
fixed-price meal
Ballet A classical type of dance

Brunette Brown-haired girl.

Chauffeur Driver

Cliché A stereotype

Déjà vu “Already seen”: an

impression or illusion of
having seen or
experienced something
before.
Fiancé Betrothed; a
man/woman engaged to
be married.
Retard Translates as late, but is
used as a derogative
term for someone who is
a slow thinker
Role A part or function of a
person in a situation or
an actor in a play
soirée Evening party

Silhouette Image of a person, an

object or scene
consisting of the outline
and a featureless
interior, with the
silhouetted object
usually being black
Voilà! Literally “see there”; in
French it can mean
simply “there it is”; in
English it is generally
restricted to a
triumphant revelation
Modern English:
From the late 15th century, the language changed into
Modern English, often dated from the Great Vowel
Shift.
The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although
an important factor may have been the very fact of the
large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages
of Europe during this time, which required a different
kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly
English phenomenon, and contemporary and
neighbouring languages like French, German and
Spanish were entirely unaffected. It affected words of
both native ancestry as well as borrowings from French
and Latin.

In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer),

the long vowels were generally pronounced very much
like the Latin-derived Romance languages of Europe
(e.g. sheep would have been pronounced more like
“shape”; me as “may”; mine as “meen”; shire as
“sheer”; mate as “maat”; out as “oot”; house as “hoose”;
flour as “floor”; boot as “boat”; mode as “mood”; etc).
William the Conqueror’s “Domesday Book”, for
example, would have been pronounced “doomsday”,
as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. After the
Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciations of these and
similar words would have been much more like they
are spoken today. The Shift comprises a series of
connected changes, with changes in one vowel
pushing another to change in order to "keep its
distance", although there is some dispute as to the
order of these movements. The changes also
proceeded at different times and speeds in different
parts of the country.

As for English today, the industrial and scientific

advances of the Industrial Revolution created a need
for neologisms to describe the new creations and
discoveries. To a large extent, this relied on the
classical languages, Latin and Greek, in which scholars
and scientists of the period were usually well versed.
Although words like oxygen, protein, nuclear and
vaccine did not exist in the classical languages, they
could be (and were) created from Latin and Greek
roots. Lens, refraction, electron, chromosome,
chloroform, caffeine, centigrade, bacteria, chronometer
and claustrophobia are just a few of the other science-
based words that were created during this period of
scientific innovation, along with a whole host of “-
ologies” and “-onomies”, like biology, petrology,
morphology, histology, palaeontology, ethnology,
entomology, taxonomy, etc.
Conclusion:
The aim of this paper, was to sketch briefly the
history of the English language. It has undergone
a lot of dramatic changes throughout the course of
history, ever since it first arrived on the shores of
Britain from the North of Europe. It continued to
get influenced by many languages and change in
many different ways in many different contexts,
and these changes can only mean that the
language that was spoken at that time is almost
incomprehensible to us now.
English, as for today, exists as an international
language and an important mean of
communication around the globe. English has
been the most common world-wide language, and
it will always be.