ET122: The History and Spread of English

Unit 4: Indo-European Origins and Old English

Where did English come from:

 English has evolved through generations of speakers while undergoing major changes over
time
 Modern English shares many similar words with Latin-derived Romance languages, French
and Spanish. Most of these words were not originally part of English. They arrived with the
Norman invasion in 1066 when the French-speaking Normans conquered England and
became its ruling class. They added a massive amount of French and Latin vocab to the
English language previously spoken (Old English)
 Old English = language of Beowulf.
 Old English belongs to the Germanic language family, first brought to the British Isles in the
5th and 6th centuries by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The Germanic dialects they spoke
would become known as Anglo-Saxon.
 Viking invaders in the 8th to 11th centuries added more borrowings from old Norse into the
mix.
 English (along with many other languages) descended from their own common ancestor
known as Proto-Germanic spoken around 500 B.C.E
 Proto-Germanic can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European (includes almost all languages
spoken in Europe)

What was Old English:

 Where did it come from
 It is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic)
dialects from the 5th century.
 Where was it spoken
 Spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, England (except the
extreme south-west and north-west), southern and eastern Scotland and the
eastern fringes of modern Wales.
 When was it spoken
 450 CE until c.1150
 What varieties were there
 There were four dialects of OE:
 Northumbrian in northern England and southeastern Scotland
 Mercian in central England
 Kentish in southeastern England
 West Saxon in southern and southwestern England
 Mercian and Northumbrian are often classed as the Anglian dialects
 West Saxon dialect – the most extant OE writings
 General Features of Old English
 Had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter)
 Noun and adjective paradigms contained four cases (nominative, genitive, dative
and accusative) while pronouns also had forms for the instrumental case