English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders and/or settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually became predominant.
The English language underwent extensive change in the Middle Ages. Written Old English of AD 1000 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 recognisable in written Middle English of AD
1400. The transformation 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 Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. A large proportion of the modern English vocabulary comes directly from Anglo-Norman.
Close contact with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English. However, these changes had not reached South West England
by the 9th century AD, where Old English was developed into a
full-fledged literary language. The Norman invasion occurred in 1066,
and when literary English rose anew in the 13th century, it was based on
the speech of London, much closer to the centre of Scandinavian settlement. Technical and cultural vocabulary was largely derived from Old Norman, with particularly heavy influence in the church, 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 Norman and French as the main source of new words. Thus, English developed into very much a "borrowing" language with an enormously disparate vocabulary.
After the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the Germanic language possibly displaced the indigenous Brythonic languages and Latin in most of the areas of Great Britain that later became England. The original Celtic languages remained in parts of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (where Cornish
was spoken into the 19th century), although large numbers of compound
Celtic-Germanic placenames survive, hinting at early language mixing.[3] Latin also remained in these areas as the language of the Celtic Church and of higher education for the nobility. Latin was later to be reintroduced to England
by missionaries from both the Celtic and Roman churches, and it would,
in time, have a major impact on English. What is now called Old English emerged over time out of the many dialects and languages of the colonising tribes.[4]
Even then, Old English continued to exhibit local variation, the
remnants of which continue to be found in dialects of Modern English.[4] The most famous surviving work from the Old English period is the epic poem Beowulf composed by an unknown poet.
Old English varied widely from modern Standard English.
Native English speakers today would find Old English unintelligible
without studying it as a separate language. Nevertheless, English
remains a Germanic language, and approximately half of the most commonly
used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English. Many non-standard dialects such as Scots and Northumbrian English have retained features of Old English in vocabulary and pronunciation. Old English was spoken until some time in the 12th or 13th century.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, Old English was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Old Norse, spoken by the Norsemen who invaded and settled mainly in the North East of England (see Jórvík and Danelaw).
The Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians spoke related languages from
different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots
were the same or similar, although their grammars were more divergent.
The Germanic language of the Old English-speaking inhabitants was
influenced by extensivae contact with Norse colonizers, resulting perhaps
in cases of morphological simplification of Old English, including the
loss of grammatical gender and explicitly marked case
(with the notable exception of the pronouns). English borrowed
approximately two thousand lexical items from Old Norse, including anger, bag, both, hit, law, leg, same, skill, sky, take, and many others, possibly even including the pronoun they.
The introduction of Christianity late in the 6th century encouraged the addition of over 400 Latin loan words, such as priest, paper, and school, and fewer Greek loan words. The Old English period formally ended some time after the Norman conquest (starting in 1066 AD), when the language was influenced to an even greater extent by the Normans, who spoke a French dialect called Old Norman. The use of Anglo-Saxon to describe a merging of Anglian and Saxon languages and cultures is a relatively modern development.
