A Short History of the English Language
Germanic roots
English belongs to the West Germanic family, together with Dutch, Frisian and German. Around 450 AD, Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea and settled in Britain. Their dialects merged into Old English. Christian missionaries from 597 onwards brought Latin words such as school, bishop and candle.
Old English and the Vikings
Old English, the language of the epic Beowulf, had complex word endings much like modern German, and today’s readers can hardly understand it. From the 8th to the 11th century, Viking settlers added everyday Norse words such as sky, window, knife, give and even they, them and their. Mixing two closely related languages also helped simplify English grammar.
The Norman Conquest
After 1066, French became the language of the court and the law for some 300 years, while ordinary people kept speaking English. That is why English often has two words for the same thing: the farm animals cow and pig are Germanic, while the meat on the table, beef and pork, is French. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1390) is the great work of this Middle English period.
Shakespeare and the Great Vowel Shift
Between about 1400 and 1700 the pronunciation of long vowels changed dramatically. Printing arrived in England in 1476, in the middle of this shift, and fixed spellings that reflected older sounds. That is why English spelling and pronunciation so often disagree, as in knight. The Renaissance brought new words from Latin and Greek, and Shakespeare helped popularise many words we still use, such as lonely and bedroom.
A global language
Trade and colonial expansion carried English around the world. Along the way it picked up words like jungle and shampoo from Hindi, chocolate and tomato from Nahuatl, and safari from Swahili. In the 20th century, English became the main language of science, aviation and business. Today the internet keeps adding new words such as selfie, hashtag and podcast.
Based on: The History of the English Language, International English Test (IET) https://internationalenglishtest.com/de/blog/geschichte-der-englischen-sprache/