| 1 | The Story of the English Language (Level 2)

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The land of the Angles
You probably think of England as the cradle* of the English language. Why not, England actually is "the land of the Angles". People from Britain are still often called Anglo-Saxons. But, let's start from the beginning.

The Celts
The Celts were the first to inhabit* the British Isles. They came from the south-eastern parts of the European continent. They spoke Celtic which is very different from English, even if the two languages have a common Indo-European background. The Celts were pushed back, first by the Romans and then by the Anglo-Saxons. There are still people of Celtic origin, and Celtic is still spoken, though, but only by small minorities* in the British Isles. Celtic has not influenced* the English language very much. There are only a dozen or so words that are used in English.

The Romans
The Romans started invading* Britain some fifty years B.C. They ruled for more than 400 years. You can still see evidence of this period, like Hadrian's Wall near the border between England and Scotland. The Romans spoke Latin. There are very few Latin words in the English language that date back to this period. Place-names, like all those ending in -caster and -chester (Doncaster, Winchester, etc.) give you an idea of where the Romans settled*. The Latin word 'castra' means camp. The Romans were, among other things, known for building roads. The English word street comes from 'via strata' - the straight road. Latin was to become much more important for the development of English much later.

Germanic tribes*
The Roman withdrawal* at the beginning of the 5th century made room for the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to move across to Britain from the northern parts of Europe. These tribes spoke slightly different languages, but they were of common Germanic origin. The period from the beginning of the 5th century to the next major invasion, in 1066, is generally thought of as Anglo-Saxon. We may conclude that English is basically a Germanic language. As such it is quite closely related to some of the other languages in Europe, like German and Dutch. Before 1066 it had not been much influenced by any language outside the Germanic group. The Vikings that raided* and ruled parts of Britain during three centuries prior to* 1066 also spoke Germanic languages.

"1066 and all that"
The Norman invasion in 1066 (the Battle* of Hastings) was the beginning of a more than three-hundred-year-long period of French influence. William the Conqueror* and his men came from Normandy, France. French is, like English, an Indo-European language, but like Spanish and Italian it belongs to the Latin group of languages, not the Germanic. The English language survived although French was the language spoken by the ruling classes. When Henry IV became king in 1399, he ended the French dominance as he was the first monarch* since before the Battle of Hastings who spoke English as his mother tongue*. It is estimated that by the end of the 15th century as much as 25% of the total vocabulary was of French/Latin origin.

Latin influence
As Latin was the language of the Catholic as well as the Protestant church it influenced English as well as other languages in Europe in no small way. For hundreds of years Latin was the language of not only the dominant church, but also the universities and the schools. More than 50% of the English vocabulary is of Latin origin.