The origins of the English language

English, due to its growing popularity, with even more people trying to master it, has become the language of political negotiations and international business, as well as the international language of science and medicine. For instance, according to international treaties, passenger airplane pilots must have a command of English these days. English is the major foreign language taught in most schools in South America and Europe. It is the official language of more than seventy-five countries, including Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia and South Africa.

But where did the English language come from? To answer this question, we have to travel back in time about five thousand years to an area north of the Black Sea in South-Eastern Europe.

Experts say that people living in that area spoke a language called Proto-Indo-European, which is now extinct. Although a plethora of research has been devoted to this language, researchers do not know what it really sounded like. Yet, Proto-Indo-European is considered to be the ancestor of most European languages, including ancient Greek, ancient German, and ancient Latin, which then gave rise to the European languages that are known to us today.

English was particularly susceptible to the influence of other languages due to numerous invaders that tried to conquer the British Isles over the years, some examples being the Anglo-Saxons – a Germanic tribe, the Vikings from Scandinavian countries, and the Normans – a French-speaking people from Normandy in the north of France.

Each tide brought about new changes, which were soon incorporated into the English language, forming a mixture of various influences. That is why traces of French, Latin and German can be observed in English:

• damage, prison, and marriage, as well as most English words that describe law and government, for example jury, parliament and justice, come from Norman French,
• sky, leg, skull, egg, crawl, lift and take are from the old languages of the far northern countries,
• some of the most fundamental and important words (e.g. man, wife, child, son, daughter, brother, friend, live, fight, make, use, love, like, look, drink, food, eat) are the result of the Anglo-Saxon invasion.

The website thehistoryofenglish.com defines the following main periods in the history of the English language:

• Before English (Prehistory - c. 500AD) (including Indo-European, Spread of Indo-European Languages, Germanic, The Celts, The Romans)

  
   

• Old English (c. 500 - c. 1100) (including Invasions of Germanic Tribes, The Coming of Christianity and Literacy, The Anglo-Saxon or Old English Language, The Vikings, Old English after the Vikings)
• Middle English (c. 1100 - c. 1500) (including Norman Conquest, French (Anglo-Norman) Influence, Middle English After the Normans, Resurgence of English, Chaucer and the Birth of English Literature)
• Early Modern English (c. 1500 - c. 1800) (including Great Vowel Shift, The English Renaissance, Printing Press and Standardization, The Bible, Dictionaries and Grammars, Golden Age of English Literature, William Shakespeare, International Trade)
• Late Modern English (c. 1800 - Present) (including The Industrial and Scientific Revolution, Colonialism and the British Empire, The New World, American Dialect, Black English, Britain’s Other Colonies, Language Reform, Later Developments, 20th Century)
• English Today (including Who Speaks English?, English as a Lingua Franca, Reverse Loanwords, Modern English Vocabulary, Modern English Spelling).

Such a distinction allows us to visualize the complexity of the changes that have occurred in the course of time. As can easily be noticed, Old English looked nothing like the English that is used nowadays. However, even the present-day English comes in various forms and varieties, which results from its spreading over numerous countries and being used