Overview Of History Of The English Language

Indo-European Beginning

English belongs to it

From Proto-Indo-European language (first language that was spoken in Europe 5000 years ago)

PIE - original language speaker - denoted in a particular region

Evidence For A Common Ancestor

similarities between languages

analysis of morphological and pronunciation patterns

Cognates

Words that are similar in meaning, pronunciation, and morphological structure across many languages.

Migration & Evolution

The major reason of slang and other languages

Will be similar to parent language but will still differ

Where does English stem from?

From West-Germanic region

Germanic to Old English

5th century AD - Germanic tribes settled in Britain

They displaced native Celtic langauges such as Latin, creating old English

Old English

Most commonly used words - traced back to old English

Scadinavian Influence

Vikings came to Britain - 8th to 11th century

Danish controlled modern day English and Scotland

Spoke Old Norse - influenced many new words

French Invasion - Middle English

1066 - Normans invaded England - took over as rulers

French - language of rich - influenced the rich

Lasted to 15th century - classified as “Middle English” - still hard to interpret

Early Modern English

less than 100 years old in 1590 when Shaespeare was writing

Shakespeare contributed 1700 new words to English

No formal dictionaries - most documents in Latin

Latin & Greek Influences

Lot of words were added

Traditional languages - more widespread in 16th century and 17th century

Modern English

hasn’t changed much from the 18th century (pronunciation and grammar)

main change - technology and new concepts - inventing new words to keep up

4 phases of English

Early English - 450 to 1150 AD

Middle English - 1150 to 1500 AD

Early Modern English - 1500 to 1700 AD

Modern English - 1700 to present day