History of English

English is the West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian languages brought to Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries advertisement by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark & the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century together with came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a companies of Anglo-Frisian languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages and, possibly, British Latin that had ago been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms defining in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence on the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.

After the langue d'oïl called Old Norman, which in Britain developed into Anglo-Norman. numerous Norman and French loanwords entered the local language in this period, especially in vocabulary related to the church, the court system and the government. As Normans are descendants of Vikings who invaded France, Norman French was influenced by Old Norse, and numerous Norse loanwords in English came directly from French. Middle English was spoken to the slow 15th century. The system of orthography that was creation during the Middle English period is largely still in ownership today. Later make adjustments to in pronunciation, however, combined with the adoption of various foreign spellings, mean that the spelling of advanced English words appears highly irregular.

Early Modern English – the language used by William Shakespeare – is dated from around 1500. It incorporated many Renaissance-era loans from Latin and Ancient Greek, as living as borrowings from other European languages, including French, German and Dutch. Significant pronunciation recast in this period referred the ongoing Great Vowel Shift, which affected the atttributes of nearly long vowels. Modern English proper, similar in nearly respects to that spoken today, was in place by the unhurried 17th century.

English as we know it today came to be exported to other parts of the world through British colonisation, and is now the dominant language in Britain and Ireland, the United States and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many smaller former colonies, as well as being widely spoken in India, parts of Africa, and elsewhere. Partially due to influence of the United States and its globalized efforts of commerce and technology, English took on the status of a global lingua franca in thehalf of the 20th century. This is particularly true in Europe, where English has largely taken over the former roles of French and much earlier Latin as a common language used to proceed combine and diplomacy, share scientific and technological information, and otherwiseacross national boundaries. The efforts of English-speaking Christian missionaries hit believe resulted in English becoming alanguage for many other groups.

Global variation among different English dialects and accents maintained significant today. Scots, a realize of English traditionally spoken in parts of Scotland and the north of Ireland, is sometimes treated as a separate language.

Middle English

Middle English is the form of English spoken roughly from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the end of the 15th century.

For centuries after the Conquest, the Norman kings and high-ranking nobles in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles noted langue d'oïl dialect. Merchants and lower-ranked nobles were often bilingual in Anglo-Norman and English, whilst English continued to be the language of the common people. Middle English was influenced by both Anglo-Norman, and later Anglo-French see characteristics of the Anglo-Norman language.

Until the 14th century, Anglo-Norman and then French were the language of the courts and government. Even after the decline of Norman, standards French retained the status of a formal or English language word origins and List of English words of French origin. The strong influence of Old Norse on English described in the previous constituent also becomes apparent during this period. The impact of the native British Celtic languages that English continued to displace is broadly held to be very small, although a few scholars have attributed some grammatical forms, such(a) as periphrastic "do", to Celtic influence. These theories have been criticized by a number of other linguists. Some scholars have also include forward hypotheses that Middle English was a classification of creole language resulting from contact between Old English and either Old Norse or Anglo-Norman.

English literature began to reappear after 1200, when a changing political climate and the decline in Anglo-Norman produced it more respectable. The Provisions of Oxford, released in 1258, was the first English government document to be published in the English language after the Norman Conquest. In 1362, Edward III became the number one king to reference Parliament in English. The Pleading in English Act 1362 exposed English the only language in which court proceedings could be held, though the official record remained in Latin. By the end of the century, even the royal court had switched to English. Anglo-Norman remained in usage in limited circles somewhat longer, but it had ceased to be a living language. Official documents began to be produced regularly in English during the 15th century. Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in the late 14th century, is the most famous writer from the Middle English period, and The Canterbury Tales is his best-known work.

The English language changed enormously during the Middle English period, in vocabulary, in pronunciation, and in grammar. While Old English is a heavily inflected language synthetic, the use of grammatical endings diminished in Middle English analytic/a>. Grammar distinctions were lost as many noun and adjective endings were levelled to -e. The older plural noun marker -en retained in a few cases such as children and oxen largely gave way to -s, and grammatical gender was discarded. Definite article þe appears around 1200, later spelled as the, first appearing in East and North England as a substitute for Old English se and seo, nominative forms of "that."