Origin and development of the English language

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Old English (450-1100)

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The history of English started with the arrival of Germanic tribes (the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes), who crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany and invaded Britain during the 5th century AD, soon after the Romans’ withdrawal. At that time, the inhabitants of Britain (the Britons) spoke a number of Celtic dialects while the invaders’ language was Anglo-Saxon (or Englisc), a branch of the Indo-European language family that developed into Old English. This language soon became dominant over the language spoken by the Britons and also over Latin, which had been brought to Britain by the Romans and was in use among the aristocracy and the clergy. Latin, however, did not disappear. With the arrival of Christianity at the end of the 6th century the monks started writing manuscripts in Latin that were later translated into Old English.

Old English was widely spoken until around 1100 with the arrival of the Normans in 1066 but it did not disappear. About half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots.

Middle English (1100-1450)

After William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066 the new Norman conquerors introduced the French language, which became the language of the royal court, and of the ruling and business classes. For a period there was a sort of linguistic class division, where the lower classes spoke Old English and the upper classes spoke French, while the clergy used Latin. Gradually the three languages mixed together and by the end of the 14th century they developed into Middle English which also became the language of the new literature.

Early Modern English (1450-1750)

The transition from Middle English to Early Modern English was slow and characterized by great changes: the Great Vowel Shift –vowels sounds in English were pronounced differently from other European languages – and the standardization of the written language we know today.

In 1476 William Caxton (1422-1491), a publisher and a translator, set up the first printing press in England thus providing an incredible opportunity for education and literature. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect of London became the standard language used by William Shakespeare and his fellow citizens. In the 17th and 18th centuries the vocabulary was enriched with words and expressions from the places interested by British trade expansion and also from the fields of science and learning.