Where did English Come From?
10 February 2005
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Well, English did come from the same ancestor as German, but there's a lot more to the story. In the fifth century, Celts lived in the British Isles. But warfare among them became so fierce that one local king asked for help from Germanic tribes living in southern Denmark and northern Germany. He got more than he bargained for: the tribes came as allies, but they liked the island so much they decided to take it over.
Two of the main tribes in this migration came from regions called Angeln and Saxony. Which is why we call the language they brought to Britain "Anglo-Saxon". The speech of the tribes who stayed on the Continent eventually became modern German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages; and Anglo-Saxon, also known as "Old English", grew into the English we speak today.
On their new turf the Anglo-Saxons started to talk in new ways. The tribes they drove to the fringes of Britain left them some Celtic place names. But more important, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, so a good deal of Latin crept into their language. Another influence showed up in the ninth and tenth centuries as Britain -- which by then was called Angle-land, or England -- was invaded again, this time by Scandinavian cousins of the Anglo-Saxons. Viking raiders ruled all of England for a couple of decades. Their contact with the Anglo-Saxons was so close that they've given us some of our most everyday words -- like sister, sky, law, take, window, and the pronouns they, them, and their.
The greatest additions to English resulted from another invasion we all know about: "1066 and all that." England was conquered by descendants of another group of Vikings -- the "Normans", men of the North -- who had settled in the tenth century along the coast of France that still bears their name -- Normandy. They spoke French. And when they took over, the Normans made French the government language of England, which soon became a trilingual country: officials used Norman French, the church used Latin, and the common people spoke a version of English we call "Middle English".
The common people were by far the majority, and by the late fourteenth century, their English reasserted itself over French as the language of Britain. But it was a different English than the Anglo-Saxon spoken before the Conquest. Over the years it absorbed an enormous number of French words for legal, governmental, military, and cultural matters: words like judge, royal, soldier, and a host of food terms like fruit and beef.
English vocabulary wasn't the only thing that was changing. Even before the Norman Conquest, a major overhaul of Old English grammar had begun. In modern English we use word order to distinguish "dog bites man" from "man bites dog". Old English, like Latin, showed who was the biter and who was the bitee by a system of word endings instead. But in Old English, people stressed the first syllables of words so strongly that they began to skip over word endings. Think of how some of us reduce "probably" to "probly", dropping a syllable. This process drove English in the direction of the word-order-based grammar we have today.
What we call "Modern English" grew out of Middle English in response to several developments: at the end of the fifteenth century, printing was introduced into England, which helped standardize the language. And in the sixteenth century Englishmen began to explore the globe. They encountered new things that needed to be talked about with new words. They settled in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Australia, and the South Seas. And the language was enriched by words from everywhere.
As it became a global language, English absorbed many new words. Most of our core vocabulary comes directly from Old English: words like mother, love, cow, and glad. But we have borrowed words from scores of other languages: from Afrikaans to Zend. Most of the words in a large dictionary -- maybe 85 or 90 percent of them -- are either loanwords from other languages or words invented in English using elements borrowed from other languages.
So did English come from German? No-- it's closely related to German, but what began as the tongue of a small tribe in northwestern Europe, morphed over time into something very different -- and something really remarkable.
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from John Algeo, linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about language -- go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And if we use your question on the air, we'll send you a membership in the Museum of Language. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.