Princess Clarisse Faith L.
Niro August 4, 2015
History of English Language
Anglo-Saxon / Old English
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon as it is also known, is the oldest form of English. The original
speakers of English came from the part of Europe that is now Germany and Denmark in the form of
three tribes called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The three tribes had their own dialects but we
now collectively refer to all the dialects as either Old English or Anglo-Saxon. This language was spoken
in parts of England and Scotland between the 5th and 12th centuries.
Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon
settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion.
Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic (also known as North
Sea Germanic) dialects from the 5th century. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the
late 7th century. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cdmon's Hymn, composed
between 658 and 680. There is a limited corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the
oldest coherent runic texts (notably Franks Casket) date to the 8th century.
Like other historical languages, Old English has been used by scholars and enthusiasts of later
periods to create texts either imitating Anglo-Saxon literature or deliberately transferring it to a different
cultural context. Examples include Alistair Campbell and J. R. R. Tolkien. A number of websites devoted
to Neo-Paganism and Historical re-enactment offer reference material and forums promoting the active
use of Old English. By far the most ambitious project is the Old English Wikipedia, but most of the Neo-
Old English texts published online bear little resemblance to the historical model and are riddled with
very basic grammatical mistakes.
Norman Conquest and the Middle English
Norman Conquest
The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman
Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England)
invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition
along with his nobles and court. William crushed the opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the
Anglo-Saxon earls of their property, distributing it to Normans (and some English) who supported him.
The conquering Normans were themselves descended from Vikings who had settled in northern
France about 200 years before (the very word Norman comes originally from Norseman). However, they
had completely abandoned their Old Norse language and wholeheartedly adopted French (which is a so-
called Romance language, derived originally from the Latin, not Germanic, branch of Indo-European), to
the extent that not a single Norse word survived in Normandy.
However, the Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences,
usually called Anglo-Norman or Norman French, which was quite different from the standard French of
Paris of the period, which is known as Francien. The differences between these dialects became even
more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King John and England lost the
French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England became even more isolated from
continental Europe.
Middle English
The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly
opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English
period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.) In terms of external history, Middle
English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by
the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English
Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.
During these Norman-ruled centuries in which English as a language had no official status and no
regulation, English had become the third language in its own country. It was largely a spoken rather than
written language, and effectively sank to the level of a patois or creole. The main dialect regions during
this time are usually referred to as Northern, Midlands, Southern and Kentish, although they were really
just natural developments from the Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish dialects of Old
English. Within these, though, a myriad distinct regional usages and dialects grew up, and indeed the
proliferation of regional dialects during this time was so extreme that people in one part of England could
not even understand people from another part just 50 miles away.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209 respectively, and
general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still copied by
hand and therefore very expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East
Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed (London had been the largest city for some
time, and became the Norman capital at the beginning of the 12th Century), and the other regional
varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education. The 14th
Century London dialect of Chaucer, although admittedly difficult, is at least recognizable to us moderns
as a form of English, whereas text in the Kentish dialect from the same period looks like a completely
foreign language.
It was also during this period when English was the language mainly of the uneducated peasantry
that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. By the
14th Century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11
different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in
modern English. The pronounced stress, which in Old English was usually on the lexical root of a word,
generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes
that had begun after the Viking invasions, and many vowels developed into the common English
unstressed schwa (like the e in taken, or the i in pencil). As inflectons disappeared, word order
became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order
had gradually become the norm, and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb inflections.
Middle English language, the vernacular spoken and written in England from about 1100 to about
1500, the descendant of the Old English language and the ancestor of Modern English.
The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods: (1) Early Middle English, from
about 1100 to about 1250, during which the Old English system of writing was still in use; (2) the Central
Middle English period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked by the gradual formation of
literary dialects, the use of an orthography greatly influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system, the
loss of pronunciation of final unaccented -e, and the borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman
words; the period was especially marked by the rise of the London dialect, in the hands of such writers as
John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer; and (3) Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about 1500, which
was marked by the spread of the London literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish
dialect and the other northern dialects. During this period the basic lines of inflection as they appear in
Modern English were first established. Among the chief characteristic differences between Old and
Middle English were the substitution of natural gender in Middle English for grammatical gender and the
loss of the old system of declensions in the noun and adjective and, largely, in the pronoun.
The dialects of Middle English are usually divided into three large groups: (1) Southern
(subdivided into Southeastern, or Kentish, and Southwestern), chiefly in the counties south of the River
Thames; (2) Midland (corresponding roughly to the Mercian dialect area of Old English times) in the area
from the Thames to southern South Yorkshire and northern Lancashire; and (3) Northern, in the Scottish
Lowlands, Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham, northern Lancashire, and most of Yorkshire.
Early Modern English
Early Modern English is the stage of the English language used from the beginning of the Tudor
period until the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English in the
late 15th century to the transition to Modern English during the mid- to late 17th century.
Prior to and following the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the emerging
English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland.
Modern readers of English are generally able to understand texts written in the late phase of the
Early Modern English period (e.g. the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William
Shakespeare), while texts from the earlier phase (such as Le Morte d'Arthur) may present more
difficulties. The Early Modern English of the early 17th century forms the base of the grammatical and
orthographical conventions that survive in Modern English.
The 17th-century port towns (and their forms of speech) gained influence over the old county
towns. England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, encouraging the arts
including literature, from around the 1690s onwards. Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully
by the beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, although English orthography remained somewhat fluid
until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. The towering
importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception
during the 17th and 18th century, directly contributing to the development of Standard English. As a
consequence, Shakespeare's plays are familiar and comprehensible today, 400 years after they were
written, but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, written only 200 years earlier, are
considerably more difficult for the average reader.
The early modern English period follows the Middle English period towards the end of the
fifteenth century and coincides closely with the Tudor (14851603) and Stuart (1603-1714) dynasties.
The battle of Bosworth (1485) marked the end of the long period of civil war known as the Wars of the
Roses and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII (14851509), which brought a greater
degree of stable centralized government to England. Not long before, the introduction of the craft of
printing in 1476 by William Caxton marked a new departure in the dissemination of the written word.
The end of the period is marked by the religious and political settlement of the Glorious
Revolution (1688), the transition to the Augustan age during the reign of Queen Anne (170214), and the
achievement of political unity within the British Isles through the Act of Union between England and
Scotland (1707).
The defining events of the sixteenth century were those of the Reformation, initiated under Henry
VIII in the 1530s, which severed both religious and political links with Catholic Europe. During the
seventeenth century the new science gradually achieved prominence, beginning with the writings of
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and issuing in the foundation of the Royal Society (chartered in 1662).
Late Modern English
Since 1900, a very large amount of vocabulary words has been added to English in a relatively short
period.The majority of these words are related to science and technology, and use Greek and Latin roots.
A proposal for an Academy of the English Language was first brought forth by Jonathan Swift in 1712,
but the Parliament voted against it.A more scientifically minded attitude took hold by the 19th century
when the Oxford English Dictionary was proposed in 1859.Samuel Johnsons dictionary, published in
1755 in England, was influential in establishing a standard form of spelling.
World War I and World War II threw together people from different backgrounds, and the greater social
mobility afterwards helped to lessen the differences between social accents. The development of radio
broadcasting in the early 20th century familiarized the population with accents and vocabulary from
outside their own localities.
The principal distinction between early- and late-modern English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar,
and spelling are largely the same, but Late-Modern English has many more words. These words are the
result of two historical factors: 1. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the technological society 2.
The rise of the British Empire
The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the technological society. The industrial and scientific
revolutions created a need for new words to describe the new creations and discoveries. This process of
coining new words is called neologism: a neologism is a newly coined term, word, or phrase.
The rise of the British Empire. The rise of the British Empire and the growth of global trade served not
only to introduce English to the world, but to introduce words into English.
American English
American English, or United States (U.S.) English, is the set of dialects of the English language
native to the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the
U.S.The variety of American English that is considered by many speakers to be the most free from
regional, ethnic, or cultural distinctions is the dialect known as General American.
English is the most widely spoken language in the United States. English is the common language
used by the federal government and is considered the de facto language of the country because of its
widespread use. English has been given official status by 30 of the 50 state governments. As an example,
while both Spanish and English have equivalent status in the local courts of the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico, under federal law, English is the official language for any matters being referred to the United
States District Court for the territory.
The use of English in the United States is a result of British colonization. The first wave of
English-speaking settlers arrived in North America during the 17th century, followed by further
migrations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since then, American English has been influenced by the
languages of West Africa, the Native American population, German, Dutch, Irish, Spanish, and other
languages of successive waves of immigrants to the U.S.
Global English
The development of English as a global language is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the
late 20th and early 21st centuries.
For the first time in the history of human society, a single language has become sufficiently
universal that it can be used as a global lingua franca for communication between speakers of many
languages.
The history of English has traditionally been divided into three main phases: Old English (450-
1100 AD), Middle English (1100-circa 1600 AD) and Modern English (since 1600). But it seems that
Global English represents a new and fourth phase in which its main use around the world is between non-
native speakers - a phase of its history which has only just begun and in which both the status and
linguistic form of the language are rapidly developing.
In the next 10-15 years we may witness a situation that has been much discussed since the
nineteenth century, in which the majority of the world's population can speak English.
Although Global English is largely a product of economic globalisation and very recent
developments in communications technology (and indeed has helped accelerate both), the wider roots of
English as a world language lie much further in the past.
Some point to the first English colonies in Wales and Ireland in the 12th century, or to the late
17th century when English-speaking settlements were established in North America and the slave trade
brought cheap labour from Africa. But it was largely the British colonial expansion in the 19th century
which helped establish the large communities in which English now serves as a second language - in West
and East Africa, South and South-East Asia.
New varieties of English - often referred to as New Englishes - quickly emerged from contact
with local languages. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century there was concern that these New
Englishes were diverging so much from native-speaker varieties that English would become a group of
mutually unintelligible languages - in the same way as Spanish, French and Italian evolved from Latin.
In other words, World English might have been no more than a celebration of diversity, like
World Music, rather than the global lingua franca which it has also become.
Describing Global English as a lingua franca - a means of communication between speakers of
different mother tongues - does not necessarily imply that it has become a new standard language, like the
old standard languages of nation states but now on a global level.
The use of English continues to diverge in many new, largely uncharted, ways. One major domain
of Global English lies within the many dispersed specialist communities -- from air traffic control to
microbiology to international finance.
But each of these communities has its own specialist terminology and language registers which
may be understood well amongst colleagues but not by outsiders.
English is also now used by ever more culturally hybrid communities where it has been adapted
to meet the needs of the complex identities created by globalization.
And improved communications are encouraging new forms of social networking which allow
individuals to stay in touch simultaneously with friends, family and work colleagues with different
language backgrounds.
The evidence points to a growing tolerance of multiple standards in English and growing
flexibility and fluidity in the use of English by global citizens.
