English Resources

A Very Brief History of the English Language

At the end of the 1^st century A.D. Britain was a cosmopolitan, multilingual nation where Latin was the language of government, under Roman rule, and Celtic was spoken by the masses. The beginnings of English as we know it did not appear until the early 5^th century A.D. following the withdrawal of the Romans and the subsequent invasion, from north-western Europe, by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

The earliest writing thought to be in English is a runic inscription found on the ankle bone of a roe-deer near Norwich around 400 A.D. This is a Germanic script known as the futhorc, for which there is evidence in mainland Europe from the 3^rd century A.D.

Before the Roman invasion Britain was inhabited by the Celts, and although Celtic is a different language to Engklish there is a common ancestor. The Indo-European family of languages had ten branches: Germanic, Celtic, Latin, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, Tocharian, Armenian, Albanian, and Balto-Slavic. The origin of these languages is believed to be the Ukraine area of southern Russia in about 5000 B.C., and, geographically, covered the area from the Rhine to the Aral Sea. Further, there is research continuing to find out if a deeper level of common language existed, connecting across an even wider geographical area, and given the name Proto-Indo-European. The Germanic branch of Indo-European had three distinct geographical areas: East Germanic, comprising Burgundian, Vandal and Gothic; North Germanic, consisting of Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish and Danish; and West Germanic, made up of German, Dutch, Frisian, Flemish and English. These languages were inflected, as modern German is now, but by a gradual process through West Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, Old English and Middle English, the language has simplified and lost its inflections. Over the centuries English has shown a remarkable resilience to conquest and borrowings from other languages and a wonderful capacity for forming new words.

The Germanic languages of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes provided, then, the basis of what became English, although the different dialects of Northumbrian, Mercian, Saxon and Kentish were not made uniform until thew 10^th century. Although there are other examples of runic language surviving, such as the Franks Casket from the early 8^th century, and the Ruthwell Cross from around 700 A.D., the oldest surviving document of Old English is the venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Written in Latin in 731 A.D. it was translated into Old English in the 9^th century; interestingly, Gilds's Celtic account of the same events, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, written in the 540s, gives a somewhat different view of the invasion by the Germanic tribes.

Latin, then, remained the language of writing in Bede's time, emphasising the continuing dominance of the Roman Catholic church in society; Old and Middle English continued as a spoken language but there are few remaining documents to show us what it was like. The oldest documents that survive are from around 700 A.D. and they were glossaries of Latin words or old poems. The oldest literary work, the epic poem Beowulf, survives as a single manuscript dating from around 1000 A.D., although it was probably originally written some 250 years earlier. Unfortunately, all that remains of Old English documents amounts to only thirty medium-sized modern novels.

The influence of the early works remains in punctuation, spelling and layout and a line can be traced from Old to Modern English despite the many changes that have occurred. With an inflected language like Latin the word ending indicated the meaning, so there was often no space between words. The gradual decline in the use of inflections in Old English led to less predictable word endings and spacing became more important; the demise of inflections in English meant that word order became the indicator of meaning.

The oldest documents in both Latin and Old English are works of art and have become cultural artefacts. Monastic scriptoria produced written works in medieval England and spelling often reflected the accent of the person reading the document for the scribe to write down. Scriptoria existed in many parts of Britain and amongst the greatest surviving documents from this time is the Lindisfarne Gospels. Written around 700 A.D. it was glossed in English in the 10^th century by Aldred. In the early days English was a vernacular language struggling for an identity and it was not until the 14^th century that administrative documents were written in English. However, around the 10^th century English became a language of learning, alongside Latin as the language of religion, science and scholarship, and the vernaculars of England and Ireland were the only ones in Europe to produce their own texts.

The Viking invasion of the 9^th century led to the destruction of the northern monastries and King Alfred in the southern kingdom of Wessex took charge of literacy standards. Many texts were translated into West Saxon, notably Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care. Other documents were translated into West Saxon and there evolved a kind of uniformity of language use, reflecting Alfred's rule.

In 1066 the arrival of the Normans heralded the transition from Old English to Middle English, but still English was a minority written language. Documents were written in French and, more importantly, in Latin: to be unfamiliar with Latin was to be illiterate. The most famous document from the Norman conquest was the Domesday Book (1086.) For three hundred years the kings of England spoke French.

Despite the power of the church, secular scribes began to form their own guilds, at the end of the 12^th century, to provide services for businessmen, and authors wrote more in the vernacular (English) as more people saw a need to be able to write. By the 14^th century English began to replace French and Latin as the language of record, although Latin continued to be used in various ways into the 20^th century. With the advent of the printing press in the 15^th century (the first book printed in English, in 1473, by William Caxton, was The History of Troy) the early Modern period of English began and the language started to be standardised and to become a national language.

Sources: David Graddol English manuscripts: the emergence of a visual identity in English: history, diversity, change. Routledge (London) 1996