A Brief History Of The English Language

The English language is a big beautiful mess. Few languages are so diverse and unexpected in their history, and very few have undergone changes so dramatic and so violent. Today, English is in fact the World's language. But hundred of years ago, the English language that we know today didn't really exist. English was sort of put together gradually by different historical events.

Basically, we can divided the development of English language into three distinct Eras.
1). Old English (From 450 to 1100 AD).
2). Middle English (From 1100 to nearly 1500 AD) and lastly
3). Modern English (From about 1500 up until the present)

Languages changes and evolve over time. Just like animals, languages fade away and and go extinct. One language may spread so wide, that in specific region, local dialects creep in and those become new languages. A very common example is LATIN.

So now if we talk about English, we can say that English is a GERMANIC language with a grammar and a core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic.
Now the main question is " What is Germanic language? Does that means English is German?" No it doesn't. GERMANIC is a word used for a group of people, of a particular part of the world, who once spoke the same language (a language which doesn't exist today.)
Germanic language now includes English, German, Dutch, Danish and many more European languages.
To be more clear, English doesn't comes from German. English and German are basically cousins.

The history of the English language is related to the history of invasions and the movement of people.
During the time period 43 to 400 AD, when England was under the control and protection of the Romans, few Latin words stuck with Celtic locals (the tribal people living in England), resulting in the formation of prefixs like "pro" and "sub" in the Modern English.
The Roman left Britain around 400 AD and this allowed Germanic tribes to come in and settle. The Germanic tribe pushed most of the Celtic Britons out and settled in modern day England. Thus, Old English grew out during this period and , from the early 6th century to about 1100 AD, we have the Old English. This Old English was however, totally different from the Modern English that we use to speak today.

So what's next...?
Well, everything was going fine in Britain until the Vikings invaded, bringing with them one another language called "OLD NORSE". From this Old Norse we get words like "dirt", "choose", " egg", "kindle". The word "Thursday" means "Thor's Day" and basically all these word comes from the Old Norse. To put that into perspective, about 1% of the Modern English comes from the Old Norse and that's about 2,000 words.

Now, the next important event in the history of English language was the Norman invasion or the Norman conquest. This was an invasion led by a guy who was basically a French-speaking Viking named William the Conqueror. After William took over Britain in 1066, French started sneaking into English language. French words were spoken more by the upper class, the wealthy people of the society and in contrast the Old English was spoken more by the common people or by the people in the lower classes. So today we have pairs of words that have almost the same meaning, one from Old English and one from Old French. Words like "lawyer and attorney", "deem and judge", "hunt and chase", "pig and pork", "cow and beef", "freedom and library", "weird and strange" are some of the examples. Over 7,000 English words that we use today are from French, basically, the Norman Conquest. So this invasion gave us what we now call the Middle English.

Now, we gonna talk about the most important part (The beginning of the Modern English). There is no real invasion here, and during this period (i.e,. from 1500), we can only find important peoples and events.

First, Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is credited with creating a huge number of English words and phrase, and his plays are extremely influential to this date. Only because of Shakespeare, we have words like assassination, coldblooded, manager, uncomfortable and many more.
The other really important event that helped to shape the Modern English was the translation of Bible by King James. Apart from strengthening the strange words spelling, many new phases and idioms were created from that translation (and we still use those today). Phases like "by the skin of your teeth", "a broken heart", "a sign of the time" are some examples. Basically, there are tons of modern expressions that come from the King James Bible.

And Finally we come to the Modern English, and its an ironic reverse invasion as Britain began to explore the world. As English spread to places like India, Africa, North America and Australia via trading and colonization, some words began to trickle back slowly to English. So as a result, we have pajamas from India, trek from Africa, ketchup from China.
As English spread to those colonies, new dialects began to take shape in those places.
That's the main reason why the pronunciation of English language today, is so different from country to country.
Even today, the English language is evolving and who knows, may be one day the words I am using now may sound as old and strange to future readers as Old English sounds to me.
Thanks for reading
Have a wonderful day dear readers😌