A Quick History of the English Language

With a Focus on Old English, the Language of Beowulf

Overveiw of the History of the English Language

The English language is the product of many languages which have influenced it. Some languages have contributed to English only a few words, such as Hawaiian, from which we get hula and aloha. A few languages formed the basis from which much of modern English evolved. This latter group includes Old English, Middle English, and French, and their parent languages, Germanic and Latin. These languages had an enormous impact on the vocabulary, grammar, writing, and sounds of modern English.

Celtic Background

Celtic, the language of some of England's earliest settlers, is the origin of some English words. Also, Gaelic and Scottish are more recent languages derived from Celtic, which still have some place in the culture of the British isles. The Celts - at least those in southern and Central England - were ruled by the Romans during the late first, second, third and fourth centuries, and some Latin words and many place names also became part of their vocabulary and have survived and evolved into modern English words. However, when the Germanic tribes from western Europe invaded England in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, the Celts were either driven to remote areas or assimilated into the Germanic culture with its Germanic languages, and they have had relatively little impact on modern English.

Germanic Foundation

Each of the Germanic groups, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, spoke its own dialect, but the dialects were far more similar than they were different from each other. Languages are always in flux, and as time passed, the ways Germanic speakers spoke gradually changed. Germanic groups which had the least contact each other developed the most different ways of speaking, forming separate languages such as Old English in England and Old High German, and Old Norse in Europe. Those with more frequent contact developed more closely related ways of speaking, dialects of Old English such as Kentish and West Saxon.

During this time, much of England converted to Christianity, proselytized by missionaries from Ireland and from Rome, adopting new religious vocabulary often from the Latin language. Also, after the decline of the Roman empire, as the church became the source of formal education, Latin became the language of educated people of England all western European countries.

Viking Influence

Later Scandinavian tribes invaded and settled in England - the famous Vikings, who at the time spoke another Germanic language, Old Norse. Though they were conquerers, they tended to assimilate or blend in with the inhabitants they had conquered, acquiring their language but also adding to Old English fairly many words from Old Norse.

French Influence

The great change from Old English to Middle English began in 1064 with the Norman conquest under William the Conquerer. These people were called Northmen because they were originally of Scandinavian stock, descended from some Vikings who had taken France rather than England, becoming speakers French, a language derived from Latin. After their arrival in England, French became the language of the upper classes in England, and many, many French words replaced Old English words. The system of matching sounds and letters, that is spelling, was affected by French also. The new language, Middle English, is largely a result of this French influence.

Latin Influence

Hence Latin has influenced the development of English in various ways: in the Roman occupation, as part of the Christian influence, and as an ancestor of the French language. Of these three, Latin's role as ancestor of French is by far the most influential. Many English words of Latin origin were also formed in later periods, during the Renaissance during the revival of the secular study of Latin, and with the development of many scientific terms in Latin during the Age of Reason.

Modern English

Middle English began to evolve gradually into Modern English after the death of Chaucer in the fifteeneth century. Although no new group conquered the people in England, the sounds of English changed more in this century than in any other century in English history. The systems of spelling grammar also changed so radically in the following centuries as that a new language was being formed, modern English.

The differences between Middle English and modern English are technical will not be described here. However, in considering a Middle English work such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or an Old English one such as Beowulf, it is important to remember that each was written in a far older, very different, language than what we know today. After all, even Shakespeare's works are written in modern English and are much more like our writing and speech in the 1990's than they are like anything in Middle English. And just as Middle English is a major step back in time from modern English, Beowulf's Old English is a major step back in time from Middle English. Furthermore, just as the languages are very different from each other, the cultures they represent are very different from each other.

Focus on Old English, the Language of Beowulf

Old English Inflections and Word Order

Old English was a highly inflected language, meaning that endings and slight changes with words provided much information about the word's function in a sentence, such as whether a particular noun is used as the subject, direct object, or indirect object of a verb. Frequently, highly inflected languages have very flexible word order because word order is not needed to provide that information about the word's function. This is in marked contrast to modern English, which has some inflections, such as the -ed and -ing endings, which provide some information about the words' functions in sentences, but not much. In modern English, we have relatively few choices about word order, because "Store the book" means something different from "The bookstore," and "The boy loves the girl" is not at all the same as "The girl loves the boy." Because Old English conveyed these differences in meaning through word endings and other inflections, such changes in word order in Old English phrases would not have caused the same changes in meaning.

It follows that the Beowulf poet could arrange words quite freely to create the poetic effect he desired, but his word order, which will sometimes be preserved for you by the translater, may at times surprise you. This flexible word order enabled Old English poets to use a very formal prosody with much alliteration and rhythm, as described in the introduction to Old English Poetrp in this site.

Old English Grammar: Comparisons to Other Languages You May Have Studied

Old English nouns and adjectives had three genders, masculine and feminine, which will be familiar to students of French and Spanish, as well as neuter, which German and Latin students will recognize. They also had five cases, the nominative, accusative, and genitive, dative, and instrumental. The dative is found in German and Latin, the instrumental (or ablative) in Latin, and the others are found only in pronouns in Spanish and English.

Old English pronouns had, besides the singular and plural, a dual form distinct from other plurals referring to three or more. Old English verbs, at least, had this in common with modern English ones: there were weak verbs that changed their tense by adding an ending (walk, walked) and strong verbs that changed their tense by changing an internal vowel (sing, sang).

More on Old English

Old English had some letters that are not in modern English, the thorn, �, and eth, � for th sounds and the asc, � which sounded somewhat like a in "that." Your translation will not have these letters, but you will find it has, in the names of characters and places, many palatal and glottal consonants - consonants from the back of the mouth, like the y- sound (spelled with a ge in geat and with a j in Jute), h, and c(k). It also has more low vowels than modern English has - vowels that are said with the jaw rather low, such as a in half and father and alter. The dialects of Old English, besides Kentish and West Saxon, were Northumbrian, Anglian, and Mercian, which is the dialect in which Beowulf was written.

Another name for the Old English language is Anglo-Saxon, but the term Old English is strongly favored by modern scholars.

You can see Old English documents and hear Old English readings on some of the websites linked to the internet page of this one