The History of the English Language by Laura Howard

The use of a language, reunited the minds of the past to make it colorful variation of the original thought, shifting into a beautiful language made by the combination of others.

The English language didn’t started in England, the bases of English started in the place that now we know as Germany. English is part of the Anglo Frisian group of the indo European languages: Swedish, Dutch, Icelandic and Norwegian. The Old English or original one was talk by the German Angles, Jutes and Saxons. When they decided to invade Britain each one took a part of the south of Britain; Angles the north of England, Saxons the middle and Jutes the south, they pushed away the native Celtic cultures to the north and east, what is now Scotland and wales. And then because of the invasion of the Vikings and sharing some places with Celtic cultures they started to gain new word to their vocabulary such as down and cut.

Then with the invasion in the 11^th century of the French Normans they changed more their language adding a French touch to their language, and this is what is called the Middle English. French started to be used by the nobility so the language started to combine more with the English, giving new words and changing the meaning of others. Then England los the power over the Normandy lands so they stop using the language, but the French impact in English didn’t left.

The “modernization” of English started between 1500 and 1800, in the Renaissance. This brought to the English new words from Greek and Latin language, and the created of new idioms by the most important English Litterateur, Shakespeare. One big factor that affected English especially in pronunciation is the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift is the big change that started in 1400, and gives a big evolution for what now is pronunciation of English words, and was intended to make English easier to pronounce and understand.  Now in our days, English went into its final important change with the boom of industrialization and with the technological revolution. Words a cyber, byte, nuclear etc. that was no talked before are now commonly pronounced by our contemporaries. Now the English change more but not because of the invasions to Britain, now the English grew because of the globalization of this language, adding new words made by non-native speaker and evolving the English that we know now.

Is amazing how a language can take its words from everywhere but where is spoken. English is a combination of all the movements that affected the country like wars and invasions, and also the artistic ones, including church as a movement in that time. English is an incredible combination of global languages that at the end created also a Global Language.