This article first appeared in the May issue of the Silly Linguistics magazine. Follow me and the magazine at Blue Sky https://sillyli.ng/ppLlSw
English has nearly 400 million native speakers and a further billion second language speakers. English is the most widespread language in the world, and go anywhere in the world, if you speak English you will have the best chance of being understood out of any language spoken in the world. But it wasn’t always like that. At one point English was an unknown language spoken by some Germanic tribes in parts of Britain. Long ago, English didn’t even dominate the whole island it was on. What would become English got its start among the speech of Germanic tribes that migrated Britain from central Europe during the 5th century AD.
At the time Britain was settled by native Celtic people and Romans as Britain had been part of the Roman Empire at that time for centuries. With the decline of the Roman Empire, Germanic raids and migration increased. Eventually due to the Roman Empire needing troops elswhere, troops were withdrawn from Britain entirely and Germanic tribes began settling in Britain.
The native Celts either assimilated with the Germanic tribes or moved in the west of the country where their language (that became Welsh) is still spoken today. Some of the Celts fled Britain and migrated down to north west France and became the Bretons. The Breton language still shows strong connections to the Welsh language.
It is a curious thing that the Latin spoken by the Romans in Britain didn’t end up becoming a distinct Romance language (like what happened with French, Spanish and Italian). No one is quite sure why. Perhaps because Britain wasn’t as integrated into the Roman Empire, and thus the native Celtic languages of Britain remained strong. What is clear is that the arrival of the Germanic tribes to Britain was the nail in the coffin for the Latin spoken in Britain.
The linguistics situation in Britain was complicated and in coming centuries it would continue to be complicated. An Irish tribe called the Scoti would raid and eventually settle in northern Britain and would give Scotland it’s name. Being originally from Ireland, their language, Scottish Gaelic, shows a strong connection to the native language of Ireland, Gaeilge. Both these languages are part of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages.
The Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain, namely the Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians would eventually form one people called English (Angelcynn in Old English). The term Anglo-Saxon is often used to refer to the very early Germanic settlers of Britain to distinguish them from the later people. Anglo-Saxon society would continue to develop and strengthen in Britain.
The earliest Germanic settlers were pagan and didn’t really have a writing system. They did have rune, but they were sparsely used and only for very special occasions. It was only with the arrival of Christian missionaries that writing was properly introduced to the Germanic tribes in Britain. And with Christianity came Latin which saw it being reintroduced after it disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Eventually seven kingdoms would emerge, called the heptarchy. They were East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex. The idea of a heptarchy is a bit of a misnomer because the size and number of kingdoms during the Anglo-Saxon period varied. Dialectal variation is visible even in Old English documents. This could be merely a continuation of dialectal variation brought to Britain from the continent, or maybe those differences developed within Britain.
Raiders from Scandanavia, known as Vikings would plunder villages but some would stay. They spoke a language called Old Norse, and English would borrow a lot of words from Old Norse such as skull, skin, sky and even the word happy. But what is most intriguing is that English borrowed the word “they” from Old Norse. Pronouns are one of the types of words least likely to be borrowed so this indicates that the Norse people in Britain must have had very close and intimate dealings with the Anglo-Saxons.
Kings wanted to cultivate their image so they got poets to compose epic poetry for them. After Christianisation kings wanted to promote literacy and train local Anglo-Saxons in writing and in Christianity. King Alfred in particular is regarded as one of the best Anglo-Saxon kings and the time his rule has been named the Alfredian renaissance. New standards in writing and literacy were established and most of the Old English material we have today was written in Alfred’s dialect of Old English called West Saxon.
As the centuries unfolded the kingdoms would be taken over by the other kingdoms until in the 900s, a man called Æthelstan was the first person to unite all the kingdoms. Anglo-Saxon society loved epic poetry and tales of brave heroes and daring deeds. One of the most famous pieces of literatures was Beowulf, probably written sometime in the 800s. Here’s an excerpt
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.
This doesn’t seem like that language I am writing this article in. Not only is it very old but also most of the vocabulary is quite different to Modern English. Vocabulary that was lost in later generations are words like “þeod” (people) related to the German word “Deutsch” (which is the German word for the German language, probably because they thought of their own language as the language of the people), mægþum (meaning tribe), and wolcnum (meaning cloud).
A surprising amount of word can actually be connected with Modern English. “hwæt” became “what”, “we” is the same word as the modern version, just different pronunciation, “oft” is the same (except the form “often” is more common), “sceaþena” became “scathe” (as in a “scathing remark”), “þreatum” became “threat” and “ofer” became “over”. “þ” was called thorn and was eventually replaced with “th”. “þæt wæs god cyning” means “that was a good king” and each word in the Old English sentence became a word in Modern English.
Different from Modern English? Certainly. A completely different thing? No, I wouldn’t say that. You could say the bones are still there. In fact, out of the 100 most used words in English, only 4 are not of Germanic origin: use, because, people and just. But things have changed. The grammar has been altered, pronunciation has gone through a radical change and vaste swaths of the vocabulary has been brushed aside. What caused this massive upheaval? Not very often in history do we have such simple answers to questions, but here we do. The Norman invasion in 1066 lead by William of Normandy (later given the name William the Conqueror) changed the course of the English language.
Why did William invade? Normandy is just over the sea from Britain and people from Britain had ties across the sea. The elites of Anglo-Saxon Britain knew and spent time with Normans. William knew the Anglo-Saxons and even worked with the elites there. When the king of England, Edward the Confessor, died in 1066, the elites of England convened the Witan which was a council that chose the next king.
William said he had been promised the throne by Edward, but the nobles of England didn’t want to give the throne to a Norman so they gave it to a man called Harold who was a prominent noble of England. At the same time Britain was also being invaded by a Norse king called Harald Hardrada (or Harald Hard ruler). The Anglo-Saxons managed to defeat the Norse, but then had to rush to defend themselves against the Normans and lost at the Battle of Hastings.
The fate of the English language had surprisingly not yet been decided because William wanted to just become king and not reform English society. But for the next 20 years Anglo-Saxons kept rising up and trying to restore one of their own to the throne. As Anglo-Saxons rose up, and were defeated, rulers in that area would be deposed by William and loyal Normans placed in charge.
One by one as the rebels rose up and were put down, the elite of the country changed. In the church too things changed. Bishops were removed and Normans put in their place. One by one Anglo-Saxons were removed from places of power. Bit by bit, Anglo-Saxons put down their pens and the English language would go silent, at least on the page.
It wouldn’t be for another 200 years that English would re-emerge as a written language. In those centuries English would survive as the common language of the peasants, but French influence would start seeping in due to the prestige of it being the language of the nobles. When English re-emerged it would be very different, much more recognisable to modern eyes but the story of English had still many chapters to tell.
Come back for part 2 where will talk about the next stage in the history of English: Middle English, Chaucer and the change in pronunciation that would make English sound the way it does today.
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