History of English (Short version)

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Looking into English ancient roots and modern English we can see that this shares many similar words with Latin-derived romance languages, like French and Spanish. But these words were not part of the language originally, they started to appear into the language with the Norman invasion in England in 1066-1075 when the French-speaking Normans conquered England. Its ruling class added a massive among of French and Latin to the English language previously spoken there. We call it today the old English (English of Beowulf).

The old English belongs to the Germanic language family, brought to the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries by the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes.

The Angles, Saxons and the Jutes landed in Britain

English is a western Germanic language that originated for the dialects brought to Britain for the Germanic invaders for different part of German and Denmark.
The old English is a mix of different dialects. Some of the tribes that landed to Britain added vocabulary to this country, the Angles, Saxons and the Jutes. 

The Germanic dialect they spoke was known as Anglo-Saxon.
Viking invaders in the 8th to 11th centuries added more borrowed words from old Norse. These words descended from an own common ancestor known as Proto-Germanic with borrowed words from Latin, Swedish, German and many other languages spoken around 500 B.C.E., but this language was never written down. Nevertheless, as it’s written in the last paragraph English was influenced due to the invaders and people that arrived with their own language.

The Anglo-Saxon Kingdom

People who influenced the English language

In the 579 A.D. the missionaries Christians added more words to this language as the Vikings did, an example of some words that Vikings added and we use them today are “drag”, “die” and “fast”.

If we talk about people who influenced this language, we cannot skip to talk about William the conqueror, he was a French speaker, and when he invaded England, he brought new concepts.

The king James Bible translation (1611).

His translation shapes the way we speak English today. Dr. Johnson who wrote the Dictionary of the English also influenced this language. It took him nine years (1746-1755) to write that dictionary.
It contained forty-two thousand seven hundred words and seventy-three entries.

William Shakespeare

The poetry writer William Shakespeare was other person who added, and even invented more words, and give different meaning to some English words that were already used.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

The Oxford English Dictionary.

The work on this dictionary began in 1857, but it was only in 1884 that it began to be published in unbound fascicles. One of the things that get my attention is that this dictionary keeps being revised ever
since.

Extra information  

English keeps increasing nowadays, and we can see it in the Oxford dictionary which as we mentioned it keeps being revised since it was wrote until now. English is a language where doesn’t matter the time, this means that we are always getting new words that are useful and that help us to communicate
each other by using it.

Nowadays we have the English internet, or the English
we use when we are texting to friends or when we are using the social networks, we type kind of different words or we change some words for numbers to transmit an idea about something, and people can understand it perfectly well without problems even if they are not native speakers.

Here are some examples of the English we use when using the Social Networks and texting:

Here are some examples of the English we use when using the Social Networks and texting:

AFAIK = as far as I know

ASAP = as soon as possible

IDK =I don’t know

TXH= Thanks

BTW = By the way

CU/CYA = see you

IMO = In my opinion

LOL = Laugh out loud

OMG = O my gosh!

TTYL = Talk to you later

YW = You’re welcome

BF= Best Friend

BFF= Best Friend For ever

L8R = Later                                             

2day = Today

Here you can see a bit more information about History of English. 

 Do you want to learn more about grammar, sentence structures and more? 

Then,  click on the link to start learning English. 
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