Brief History of English Language — A Summary
By Maad M. Mijwel
The English language was born thanks to the Germanic invaders (Anglo-Saxons), who came to Britain, from the northwest of Germany and the Netherlands (badly called Holland) and also from southern Denmark. At that time, among all the dialects, the Western Saxon stood out. There was a deep influence of Scandinavian conquerors (in the north and east of England, which constituted Danelaw where their laws prevailed over Anglo Saxons.) Hence, it can be said that English is a conglomerate of Scandinavian and Continental European dialects. In particular, from France. All these migrations provoked the extinction of ancient Celtic languages and Latin that were spoken at that time.
English, in its ancient phases, indeed incorporated many words from ancient Celtic dialects, those were still spoken in Scotland and Wales; furthermore, from Latin that was the official language of the Romance Empire which has Brittania as its province.
It’s noteworthy that Romanisation had a great influence on English. Of the ancient Celtic languages, only Welsh remains from where the Cornish language totally disappeared.
The French Influence:
Normans originally came from France to Britain. By then, they had already abandoned their native language in favour of French, which was only spoken in the northern part of France, while Occitan and other dialects were spoken in the centre and the south of France.
The Normans were accompanied by Breton and French people. The conquest took place thanks to Duke Guillermo II who imposed his troops on the battlefield of Haroldo II of England. The Normans ruled England for three centuries. The kings without worrying much about the island where they were living, spoke the variant of the French language called Old Norman. The people who had their toots in England were still speaking English-Anglo-Saxon.
The impact was there; having to pay tribute to French gentlemen made the Englishman disappear too much, or at least relegated the language to the lower classes. Little by little, more Norman words were added into the British imaginary.
As an anecdote, it’s noted that English has incorporated many words from French as compared to Germanic dialects, especially in the creation of compounds (For example, Ice cream). One part of the word has its origin in that language.
The French language has made duals related to trade, for example, ‘commence’ and ‘start’, ‘continue’ and ‘go on’ etc.
It’s estimated that 45% of the English vocabulary comes from French, and 29% of the words that are torn down directly from Latin are used in legal texts only. Now, we can consider that English is a hybrid Germanic language which has the same Germanic syntactic structure, but it’s not written in Germanic and Romance languages. While Latin words are included in it directly or indirectly.
Colonialism and the language:
With the idea of expanding borders realised by the United Kingdom by the sixteenth century, English spread throughout the globe. The clearest example can be seen in the creation of the Commonwealth which includes 53 stares. In many countries, it’s not the official language. Other countries as exotic as exoctic as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Kenya etc use it officially with the aim of unifying the countries, without renouncing their native language.
In many cases, English is spoken in many other countries where people belonging to different nationalities are living irremediably in English. It should be noted that English is the official language of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Olympic Committee.
English is not the most spoken language on this planet.
Mandarin Chinese has this honour with 1100 million native speakers, English is the 2nd with 942 million people including native and non-native speakers, and Spanish is the 3rd with 520 million people all across the world. If we exclude non-native speakers of English, then Spanish would stand 2nd. However, it’s noticeable that
if we count the people who study the English language including both natives and non-natives, it would be the first language having 2000 million people who can study English almost 1/3 of the world’s population.
Peculiar conjunction of verbs:
Regarding the conjugation of verbs in English, it must be said that it has undergone an evolution very similar to that experienced in languages such as German and others derived from Romance languages, such as French and Spanish. Specifically, different forms have been created to allude to the past, present and future, as well as other conjugations known as periphrasis (also seen in those that come from Latin), which denote that an action is going to be carried out or is being carried out.
In English, the subjunctive has been weakened and condemned to the background.
There is the difference between singular and plural, something that was incorporated in more modern stages, since it was something that did not happen in Old English. In certain cases, it does not make gender differences (like the formulas "we" and "you"). This does not happen in the Romance languages, in which the pronouns have a variant for each gender and number ("we" and "we" and "you" and "you").
Conclusion:
To conclude, it must be said that the Norman invasion made the words of Anglo-Saxon origin almost disappear. In the fourteenth century there were barely 4,500 words of Old English in front of the more than 10,000 from France.
P.S. This article was originally written by Maad M. Mijwel; I’ve just summarised it.
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