A SENSE OF ENGLISH

A Short History of English

The English language has essentially three roots – Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Latin.

The development of a language is naturally influenced by invasion and occupation by other countries.

Germanic invaders from modern-day northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands during the 6th and 7th centuries impacted greatly on the formation of “Old English”.

These invaders were initially called Saxons, and as Old English began to evolve four principal dialects emerged. By the 9th Century the one known as the Western Saxon dialect became prominent and the language of literature.

So many place names in England today end in one of the following suffixes: -wick, -ton, -ham, -den, -hurst, -burn. These names date back to the Germanic inhabitants naming their new settlements, according to the natural characteristics of the place.

‘Ton’ means a fenced area, ‘wick’ and ‘ham’ a home or a dwelling, ‘den’ a pasture, ‘hurst’ a wooded hill and ‘burn’ a stream.

The 11th century saw further invasions – this time by the Normans whose “Old Norman” language fused with English to produce “Anglo-Norman”.

Subsequent Norman occupation led to the adding on to the Germanic base a new layer of words from the Latin (Romance) based languages.

The richness of the modern-day English language comes from this diverse input. Spanish, for example, is a language with only a Latin root. The complete English dictionary is nearly three times as long as its Spanish counterpart.

The growing influence of Christianity added weight to the part Latin played in the development of English, and to a small extent Greek (the language of the original New Testament) too.

The Norman occupation lasted from approximately 1100 to 1500 and the language they brought with them (a kind of French) became the language of the educated, and pervaded in business, politics and in the Royal Court.

This created a class division in which people where could be categorized by the language that they spoke – English for the lower classes and French for the upper class.

In the 14th century English returned to prominence in Britain again, but the five hundred years of French being dominant had left its mark. Many French words remained, and history recognizes this phase of the development of English as “Middle English”.

If any of you have ever read the famous English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales) you will know just how different the English is from what we speak today.

The journey from Middle English to “Modern English” was punctuated by two key factors.

The Renaissance ensured that an ongoing exposure to other languages meant that English continued to adopt foreign words (particularly from Latin and Greek) and thus expand.

This contact with other languages also contributed to what history calls “The Great Vowel Shift” which occurred mainly during the 15th Century.

The vowel sounds started to be pronounced in a shorter and shorter fashion, as they tend to be in other Romance languages. This became the standard London dialect and the one used in political discourse and professional administration.

Once printing was invented it became necessary to standardize spelling and grammar, to create a common language. Illiteracy rates dropped as growing number of people learned how to read, and books became cheaper.

In 1604 the first English dictionary was published, by which time Shakespeare was already penning his timeless classics.

Today, about 375 million people speak English as the native language. The number of people who speak it as a second language, however, is estimated to be about three times that number.