The origins of the English language

The origins of the English language

The life stories of individual words, often mazy and conjectural, need a fixed backdrop if they are to make sense. So first, a little history. English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. The precise origins of this are still a matter of some controversy, but the consensus view is that it came on the scene around 8,000 years ago in the general area to the north of the Black Sea. Since then it has split up into a large number of subgroups, which today provide nearly all the languages of Europe and have also spread over large areas of the Middle East and
northern India. Among them are the Indo-Iranian languages, including Hindi and ancient Sanskrit; the Slavic languages – Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croat, and so on; the Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian (which of all these modern languages most closely resembles its Indo-European ancestor); the Celtic languages, such as Welsh, Gaelic, and Breton; and Greek.But in the history of English, there are two particular groups that are of central importance. The first is the Romance languages: classical Latin, the literary language of ancient Rome; and French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, which evolved from Vulgar Latin, the language of the common people that spread through the Western Roman Empire. The role of Latin and French, in particular, in the growth of English vocabulary has been immense. We acquired a
sizeable portion of our words from one or other of these sources.
The second important group, of course, is the Germanic languages: for that is the group to which English itself belongs. The existence of the Germanic peoples as a separate speech community dates back at least 3,000 years. Their first northern European home has been traced to an area around the river Elbe. At this time they all spoke the same language, which is generally known as Common Germanic.
Around the 2nd century BC this began to split up into three distinct dialects. One was East Germanic. The only East Germanic language of which any written evidence survives is Gothic. Now extinct, it was spoken by Germanic peoples who migrated back eastwards to the area of modern Bulgaria and the Crimea. It provides us with our closest glimpse of what prehistoric C common Germanic must have been like. The second was North Germanic, which has evolved into modern Swedish,Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. And lastly there was West Germanic, the
ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.
The forerunners of English crossed the Channel in the 5th and 6th centuries AD.
They were brought by peoples from the northeastern corner of the European mainland, around Jutland and southern Denmark – the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.They spoke a mutually intelligible set of Germanic dialects (whose closest modern continental relative is Frisian), which formed the basis of what is now known as Old English (the alternative term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is no longer much used). This was a more or less homogeneous language, but with marked geographical differences reflecting the areas into which the various Germanic peoples had moved: the Angles into the Midlands (where Mercian was spoken)and the North (whose form of Old English is now called Northumbrian); the Jutes into Kent; and the Saxons into the rest of southern and western England (their speech is known as West Saxon).