The history of the English language

English, today the most widely spoken second language on the planet, grew out of a small group of Germanic dialects brought to Britain by a few groups of invaders in the 5th century. In fifteen hundred years it has absorbed words from dozens of languages, changed its pronunciation, lost almost all its inflections and conquered the world. Its history is traditionally divided into four great phases.

Old English (about 450-1100)

After the Romans withdrew, Angles, Saxons and Jutes, peoples from northern Germany and Denmark, settled in Britain, pushing the Celtic-speaking Britons westward. From the word Angles comes the name English, and from Engla land, "land of the Angles", that of England. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was very different from today's language, with case endings similar to German, and a modern speaker could not understand it without study. Its masterpiece is the epic poem Beowulf. From the 9th century Danish and Norwegian Vikings occupied much of northern and eastern England, the Danelaw, and Old Norse left hundreds of everyday words: sky, egg, window, knife, husband, and even the pronouns they, them and their. King Alfred the Great promoted written English by having the most important Latin texts translated.

Middle English (about 1100-1500)

The Norman Conquest of 1066 changed everything. For about three centuries the court, the nobility and the law spoke Norman French, the clergy and scholars Latin, while English remained the language of the people. The result was a curious division that still survives: live animals, raised by Saxon peasants, have Germanic names, cow, pig, sheep, while their meat, served at the tables of Norman lords, has French names, beef, pork, mutton. French brought around ten thousand words, many still in use, in government, law, religion, fashion and cooking. Meanwhile English was losing most of its inflections and simplifying its grammar. After the Hundred Years' War English became the language of the nation again: from 1362 it was used in the law courts and parliament. At the end of the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, which show that English had by then become a prestigious literary language.

Early Modern English (about 1500-1700)

In 1476 William Caxton set up the first English printing press at Westminster, helping to fix spelling on the basis of the London variety. At roughly the same time came the Great Vowel Shift, a transformation in the pronunciation of long vowels that explains why English spelling, fixed before the process was over, matches pronunciation so poorly: name was once pronounced roughly "nah-meh", bite roughly "beet". The Renaissance brought thousands of learned words from Latin and Greek. This is the age of William Shakespeare, who used a vast vocabulary and spread or coined hundreds of words and expressions, and of the King James Bible of 1611, whose language profoundly influenced English for centuries.

Modern and global English (from 1700)

In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his famous Dictionary of the English Language, which helped to stabilise spelling. In the United States Noah Webster, with his 1828 dictionary, introduced simplified spellings such as color and center, the origin of the differences between British and American English. From 1884 the Oxford English Dictionary began to appear, completed in 1928 and now containing more than 500,000 entries. The expansion of the British Empire and then the economic and cultural power of the United States made English the world's lingua franca of science, business, aviation and the internet, enriching it with words from every continent, from pyjamas and shampoo, from the languages of India, to kangaroo from Australia.

Today English has about 380 million native speakers and more than a billion people who speak it as a second language. Germanic words are a minority of the vocabulary, but they are the most used: almost all of the hundred most frequent words, such as the, and, have, be, are of Anglo-Saxon origin.

See also the languages of the United Kingdom, the history of the United Kingdom and Oxford.