The History of the English Language

This is a brief (well, relatively brief!) outline of how our mother tongue developed.  I can assure you that there are numerous and more extensive articles both in textbooks and online but this post will give you the general idea.

As an Indo-European language, English is related to many of the languages of the peoples who inhabit an area stretching from India to Ireland and Iceland.   Thousands of years ago, groups of semi-nomadic tribes spread their languages as they migrated west and various linguistic sub-groups developed.

English belongs to the sub-group known as the West Germanic group of Indo-European languages.  In contrast, Italian belongs to the Romance group of Indo-European languages.

For the purposes of this guide, let’s look at the language situation in England in the period immediately before the Roman invasion of 54 BC.   At this time the inhabitants of England were Celtic tribes who, not surprisingly, spoke various Celtic languages or dialects.

When the Romans came, they brought with them their own language, Latin.  As the imperial rulers, the Romans introduced Latin words which were used in the administration of their new province.

An example is the Latin castra – camp, which survives in the numerous place names ending in -caster or -chester:  Doncaster, Chichester, Lancaster et al. were all sites of Roman camps.  Denarius, the Latin word for penny, explains the d. symbol used to indicate pence prior to decimal currency.  In weights and measures, a mile measures the thousand steps (mille passum) of a Roman soldier on the march.  Similarly, the word military itself derives from the Latin word, miles – a soldier.  The examples are numerous!

Old English (400 – 1100 A.D.)

As the Roman Empire’s hold on power weakened during the fifth century, three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, set out from northern Germany and Denmark to invade England.

These invaders drove the Celtic people of England northwards and westwards; some even fled as far south as the coast of Brittany, France.  Modern Breton remans a Celtic language – unlike French which is a Romance language.

With them these invaders brought their languages, a group of West Germanic languages known as Anglo-Frisian.   With time these languages melded themselves into what is known as Anglo-Saxon or Old English.  The word, English, comes from Englisc, the language spoken by the Angles who came from Angleland.  Numerous words, among them sheep, water, be, strong, haven, night, hold remain from this period.

Then, in A.D. 597, St Augustine arrived in England to bring Christianity to the people.  Many Latin words (often themselves of Greek origin) entered Old English at this time.  They were mostly the words associated with the new religion:  bishop, baptism, eucharist, angel, ecclesiastical etc.

The next influence on Old English came with the Viking invasions of the late eighth and ninth centuries.  Of course the Vikings, as colonisers, introduced new vocabulary, much of which was imposed on the subjugate Anglo-saxon population.  Many words from their language, often termed Old Norse, remain in modern English and can be distinguished quite easily.   Often words which have a g, k or sk sound come from Old Norse:  basket, ask, husk, skin, egg, bag etc.  

Place names with a -by ending also reflect the Old Norse influence.   The number of towns whose names end in -by along the Yorkshire coast is hardly surprising given the proximity of Yorkshire to the lands from which the Vikings hailed.

As a child, I remember being very impressed by an elderly family friend, a Yorkshireman, whose work in exports and imports during the mid-twentieth century brought him into contact with many Scandinavians.  A lover of words, he was thrilled to discover so many vocabulary similarities between the Scandinavian languages and his Yorkshire dialect.   It is indeed a small world!

So, the basis of Old English was Anglo Saxon, but the language was coloured and influenced as a result of invasions which added new vocabularies to the original speech of the first Germanic tribes.

Although the language of this period was called Old English, its comprehension, both aural and written, would be more than challenging for most speakers of Modern English.!

The only work remaining from the period is the heroic poem, Beowulf.  A parallel text is shown below.

Middle English (1100 – 1500 A.D.)

Think 1066: the year in which William, Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings to claim the English throne.   William brought with him his Norman nobles, French speakers, to impose power on the conquered populace of England.

French was the language of power and prestige.  All administrative matters took place in French, French was the language of the court – and the language to which the ambitious aspired.  Latin remained the language of the church and English was spoken only by those deemed to be the ‘lower classes’.

While perfectly adequate words existed in English, such as house, the Normans introduced the French mansion.  Similarly, justice for fairness, pork for pig, poultry for chicken, mutton for sheep, liberty for freedom, courageous for bold, purchase for buy etc.   That the introduced French words tended to have grander associations is hardly surprising given the social structure of the time.

The Norman rulers did not maintain power however:  as the political climate changed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, more interest was shown in the language of the subjugated classes.   Middle English grew in importance and it was again used in official documentation.  The Provisions of Oxford (1258), a document setting up a new form of government in which the barons had a degree of power in terms of advising the king, was the first official document published only in English.  As such, it marked a move away from francophone linguistic superiority.

The trend continued.   This was the period during which Wycliffe, Tyndale and others translated the Bible from Latin to Middle English and Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales.

Modern English (1500 A.D. —>)

The development of Modern English occurred not as a result of invasion and conquests but as a consequence of the use of the printing press.   William Caxton set up a wooden printing press in Westminster Abbey in 1476 – and the word spread!

Without the need to rely on scribes, the Bible could be printed, manuscripts and books could be printed – and a degree of standardisation came to the written form of the English language.  Most importantly of all, people learned to read and their thirst for knowledge was part of the driving force of the Renaissance.

The works of William Shakespeare are arguably the highlight of the early period of Modern English and the Renaissance.  Although to a modern reader the text may look very formal, it is still modern English.   The vocabulary may be a little different from that which is used today but the grammatical structures are very much those of standard, educated English as spoken in the 21st century.  We can read and understand it. Consider Marc Antony’s famous eulogy for Julius Caesar:

Only a few years later, in 1611, the King James Bible (KJV) was published.  The image shows the text of a passage known as the Beatitudes (beatus = blessed in Latin) with the spelling of the day.

Apart from the fact that many of us with a Christian heritage are familiar with this passage which is often quoted at weddings and funerals, we can read and understand it without difficulty despite its having been written more than 400 years ago.   The text shown in the image is the original, archaic spelling but the KJV version familiar to the world today has modern spelling.

The Renaissance brought with it a renewed interest in the classical period of ancient Greece and Rome – and their languages.   And so the vocabulary of Modern English was enriched by vocabulary relating to culture, scholarship and political thought.

Modern English has continued to develop.   The technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century brought the need for new words to describe the new inventions – and often these words were derived from Latin and Greek.  Technology, telegraph, combustion and the like entered the language following the great age of invention.

The wealth of the Industrial Revolution brought colonial expansion.  As Britain colonised far flung parts of the globe, her colonisers adopted vocabulary never heard before.  Today we all know what a boomerang is, some of us wear jodhpurs and others of us no doubt eat ketchup!

It is easy to see why Modern English is such a rich language: its vast vocabulary has been acquired from all social, cultural and ethnic groups with whom the natives of one small island have had contact.  Its prominence in world affairs remains unsurpassed and it is the language most non-native speakers aspire to learn.  Even now more than half of all websites are believed to be in English.