History of English
...began to move out from this area and to take their language with them. It is now the most widespread family of languages. Members of it include Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, French, and Punjabi. Classical languages in the family include Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. In the 5th century CE, Germanic tribes arrived in Britain from what is now southern Denmark and northern Germany. They were Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and they spoke mutually intelligible varieties of old low German. The inhabitants of Britain at the time spoke a kind of Celtic. This was displaced in England, though the reasons for this displacement remain uncertain. The Angles came from a place called Engle, and their language was called English. About 5000 words remain almost unchanged from this period, and they remain the basic words in English. English during the Middle Ages However, the language went on developing, as languages do. For historical reasons that we needn't go into, West Saxon became the dominant form and, in the 10th century CE, the official language of the country. During the intervening centuries, Vikings from Scandinavia had raided and invaded the islands, and had brought their languages (Danish and Norse) with them. The population had also converted to Christianity, and services were conducted in a debased form of Latin known as Church Latin. Clerics (apart from exceptional people such as Alfred the Great) were the only literate people in the country and, under their influence, the Latin alphabet became the script for English. English has the largest vocabulary of any language, and one of the reasons for this is that it has taken in words from many other languages during its history. For example, where old English had wrath, sick, and craft, Norse gave us anger, ill, and skill. In 1066 CE, England was invaded by Normans from France, who spoke French, which became the official language for more than three hundred years. English absorbed many words from the invaders and developed into Middle English. (Where English had shut, answer, and room, French had close, reply, and chamber.) Poets such as Chaucer wrote in Middle English, which is usually dated 1100-1500CE. The development of modern English Modern English is said to have taken shape during the 16th century. Two powerful influences on it were the Europe-wide renaissance of classical learning and the invention of the printing press. (Printers insisted on house-styles of spelling and grammar, which tended to standardise the way in which English was written.) Two important stylistic influences were William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the Authorised Version of the Bible (sometimes known as the King James bible) which came out in 1611. Though he did sometimes over-write, Shakespeare set standards for what it is possible to express in English that last to this day, and the Authorised Version was so called because it was authorised to be read in churches. It thus influenced the use of English of everybody who went to church (which at one time was virtually the entire population). The man chiefly responsible for the AV was the churchman and scholar Lancelot Andrewes. English was taken to America by colonists, and has become the domina...