English Language: History, Definition, and Examples How It's Evolved Over

Still Changes Today

three Germanic tribes that invaded England during the fifth century
the

primary language of several countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and many of its former colonies, and the United States, and the second language in a number of multilingual countries, including India, Singapore, and the Philippines

as a first or secondary language
More than 2 billion of

the world's 7.7 billion people
It is estimated that one out of four people worldwide speak English with some degree of competence

by travelers wandering Europe about 5,000 years ago
divided into three

major historical periods: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English

the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, starting in 449
West Saxon's dialect

the dialect spoken there became the official "Old English”

The Lord's Prayer (Our Father) Fæder ure ðu ðe eart on heofenum si ðin nama gehalgod to-becume ðin rice geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum. Urne ge dæghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgifaþ urum gyltendum ane ne gelæde ðu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfle.

the Norman French dialect arrived in Britain
Old English no longer

dominated
spoken by the aristocracy
Middle English

some word forms (called inflections), the silent "e," and the

coalescing of a more constrained word order
people with the Norman French background wrote down the English words as they sounded
the establishment of the S[ubject]-V[erb]-O[bject] type of word-order as normal

Chaucer wrote in Middle English in the late 1300s
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour..."

bodily functions, and body parts inherited from Old English and

shared with the other Germanic languages
God, man, tin, iron, life, death, limb, nose, ear, foot, mother, father, brother, earth, sea, horse
Words from French are often polysyllabic terms for the institutions of the Conquest (church, administration, law), for things imported with the Conquest (castles, courts, prisons), and terms of high culture and social status (fashion, literature, art, decoration).

Greek
the Great Vowel Shift = from the 1400s through the

1750s


For example, a Middle English long high vowel such as e eventually changed to a Modern English long i, and a Middle English long oo evolved into a Modern English ou sound. Long mid- and low-vowels changed as well, such as a long a evolving to a Modern English long e and an ah sound changing to the long a sound.

(350 languages, according to David Crystal in "English as a

Global Language").
About three-quarters of its words come from Greek and Latin
Ammon Shea points out in "Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation," "it is certainly not a Romance language, it is a Germanic one. Evidence of this may be found in the fact that it is quite easy to create a sentence without words of Latin origin, but pretty much impossible to make one that has no words from Old English."

Still Changes Today