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Facultad de Lenguas y Educación

Patricia González
Grado en Educación Primaria
Usos y Funciones de la Lengua Inglesa I

UNIT 2: History and evolution of English

language
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Unit 2. History and evolution of English language 3

2.1 Introduction 3
3.1.1 Latin and Celtic languages 4
3.1.2 Germanic legacy 4
2.2 Old English 5
2.2.1 The Vikings 7
2.3 Middle English 9
2.4 Early Modern English 9
2.4.1 Classic influence in English 9
2.4.2 Printing press and Standardization 10
2.5 Bibliography 12

UNIT 2

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History and evolution of English language

2.1 Introduction

The English language is in continuous state of variation across time. The language of a
generation will differ from another and the changes that will modify the language take place
at every level of language:

Lexical level- new words appear to cover the necessity of naming new objects and
concepts, while other words stop being used.

Semantic level- the meaning of words changes.

Syntactic level- word order and grammatical structure, as well as vocabulary change.

Phonological level- pronunciation is always being modified and varies from one area
or social group to another.

Many centuries ago, English was only spoken by the English in England and by some
speakers in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. English nowadays is a worldwide international
language. It is spoken as a mother tongue by about 400 million people and as a
second/foreign language by around 600 million speakers. Many different national and
regional varieties of English have therefore developed and will continue to do so.

As many languages, English has gone through a lot of changes that have shaped the language
as we know it today. We are going to move through the different periods in which the history
of English language can be divided but, before talking about the origin and evolution of
English, we need to have a brief look to the historical events that took place before the
apparition of English.

Historical periods in the evolution of English language

CHART 1
OLD ENGLISH (OE)

7th century (1st texts) to 1100

INFLECTIONS

MIDDLE ENGLISH (ME)

1100-1500 (Norman conquest to Renaissance)

MAJOR TYPOLOGICAL CHANGE

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EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (EModE)

1500-1700 (Act of Union)

CONSOLIDATION OF STANDARD ENGLISH

LATE MODERN ENGLISH (LModE)

1700-1800

IMPERIALIST EXPANSION: THE ENGLISHES

PRESENT DAY ENGLISH (PDE)

20th century onwards.

HEGEMONY OF ENGLISH

2.1.1 Latin and Celtic languages

In the middle of the 5th century Britain had been a province of the Roman Empire for over
400 years and was governed from Rome. The official language of government was Latin, and
it was spoken not only by the Roman officials, military officers and settlers, but also by those
Britons (the original inhabitants of the island) whose native language was British, one of a
family of Celtic languages.

Romans were far more technologically advanced than the natural inhabitants of the Island,
therefore, the kind of cultural and linguistic interchange between conquers and conquered
was mostly under the control of those who had the power.

Many Latin words (related to military and administrative semantic field) as well as British
ones (especially place names and names related to natural phenomena) were kept when the
new language brought by the Anglo-Saxon invaders appeared.

2.1.2 Germanic legacy

English belongs to the German family of languages. Its ancestral language is Proto-Germanic
language which, unlike Latin, was never a written language.

The Germanic tribes were the Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Frisians and they enjoyed sailing.
Their restless personality urged them to sail away and find new lands to conquer, being
England one of these lands.

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Germanic invasion1

Around 449 the Germanic tribes began the Germanic conquest of England. By then the
Romans had long gone in order to stop the different uprisings that were taking place along the
empire. The different Germanic invasions were fast and easy. The vast majority of the
original inhabitants were absorbed into the new culture, and those who tried to resist were
enslaved or moved into Cornwall and Wales. With the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the beginning
and evolution of English language took place. The first stage is known as Old English.

2.2 Old English

The Anglo-Saxon civilization brought this new language known as Old English (date 450-
1150), a fusion language to which several of these invaders had contributed, most particularly
the Saxons from northern Germany. These invaders spread around the island and created
seven different kingdoms (Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia, and
Kent) where they settled. In each one of these kingdoms, a different variety of Old English
was spoken. That is: Old English never constituted a unified language, but a collection of
different dialects with some common features.

Figure 1 Anglo-Saxon England

Old English was a heavily inflected and richly conjugated language, with three genders
(masculine, feminine, and neuter) and four cases (nominative, dative, accusative, and
genitive). There were seven classes of “strong” verbs (irregular verbs) and three of “weak”

1
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-Anglo-Saxon-countries

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verbs (regular verbs), and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person.
Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite articles had three genders and five
case forms as a singular and four as a plural.

Old English was a language based on inflections (similar to Latin) that indicated which
function each word had in the sentence:
• nominative- it functions as subject and subject complements.
• accusative- it functions as direct objects and sometimes prepositional complements
• dative- it functions as indirect objects and most prepositional complements
• genitive - it functions similarly to possessive modifiers.

Word order was not as relevant as it is nowadays, and it was far more flexible.

From this early version of English, we also have many of the most basic terms in the
language: mann (“man”), wīf (“woman”), cild (“child”), hūs (“house”), mete (“food”), etan
(“eat”), drincan (“drink”) and feohtan (“fight”).

There were only two tenses, present and past, and future references were made with the use
of temporal particles and adverbs. There were no auxiliary verbs and double negative
constructions were possible. Modals were not auxiliary but full lexical verbs.

There is no record of the English language until after 600, when the Anglo-Saxons were
converted to Christianity and learned the Latin alphabet. The conversion began in the year
597 and was accomplished within thirty or forty years. The Celts and the early Anglo-Saxons
had used an alphabet of runes, angular characters originally developed for scratching onto
wood or stone. The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman
alphabet, which was easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment. The
Anglo-Saxons quite rapidly adopted the new Roman alphabet.

Unfortunately, Latin alphabet was a foreign one that was used to record and transcript a
language, Old English, whose sounds did not have a proper correspondence and
representation in the new alphabet. Therefore, it was in the scribe's hand to handle the
characters in such a way that represented the spoken words as an accurately as possible.
Thus, a significant dissonance between the sounds of the language and the letters used to
represent them emerged.

Christianization brought monasteries that became the cultural centres of that time. There,
monks created, compiled, and hand-copied a lot of manuscripts for their distribution or
storing in other monasteries. The hand-copy process was long and tedious that is why not
many manuscripts are kept from that time. Also, there was not a standard version of the
language, so each monk 'contributed' to the improvement of the language adapting some
spelling to represent better the pronunciation of some words according to his regional
variation. It is because of this that there are different written versions of the same text and
even, different spellings for the same words in the very same text.

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2.2.1 The Vikings

By the late 8th century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the east
cost of Britain. They came from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes
who came with the greatest force. Viking expansion was finally checked by Alfred the Great
and, in 878, a treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings established the Danelaw, an
imagined separatory line which splat the country, giving the Norsemen control over the north
and east, and the Anglo-Saxons the south and west.

Figure 3 Vikings' territory

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, an early North Germanic language not that dissimilar to
Anglo-Saxon and roughly similar to modern Icelandic. The influence of their language over
English was dramatic: not only did it introduce new words (among the most relevant ones
were the pronouns 'they', 'them', and 'their'), but it also affected the pronunciation and syntax
(Anglo-Saxon word endings and inflections started to fall away during the time of the
Danelaw, and prepositions like ‘to,’ ‘with,’ ‘by,’ etc. became more important to make
meanings clear).

More information about this point in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ppy-jA1AF8

2.3 Middle English

This period began with the arrival of the Norman French to England. William the Conqueror
(Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of Britain (1066)
from his home base in northern France. These French-speaking invaders brought their
language and it became the official language of the nobility, the government, the law and
civilized life in England for the next two hundred years. However, the Normans spoke a rural
dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called Anglo-Norman or
Norman French, which was quite different from the standard French of Paris of the period.

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One might wonder why, after the Norman Conquest, French did not become the national
language, replacing English entirely. The reason is that the Conquest was not a national
migration, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon invasion had been. Great numbers of Normans came to
England, but they came as rulers and landlords. French became the language of the court, the
language of the nobility, the language of polite society, the language of literature. But it did
not replace English as the language of the people. The low class kept its language, so English
was used by the vast majority of the population, but they had to keep their end up in French if
they wanted to have business with the dominant class. However, it cannot be assumed that
the ruling classes and the merchants did not quickly come to at least understand English if not
speak it. It would have been very difficult to oversee an estate or buy and sell unless you
could communicate.

Inevitably, the use of French by the English speakers brought some changes into the
language. The number of words used expanded greatly, with the French normally
supplementing rather than replacing the English. The Normans brought over 10,000 words to
English (about three-quarters of which are still in use today), including a huge number of
abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-
tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”.

A very interesting phenomenon started to take place: often, different words with roughly the
same meaning survived, and a whole host of new, French-based synonyms entered the
English language. Some of these words specialised or narrowed their meaning (also adding
either a better or worse connotation to their original meaning) and other changed or
broadened their reference so they could be used in other fields (the French alternative often
suggesting a higher level of refinement than the Old English).

NEW FRENCH WORDS OLD ENGLISH COUNTERPARTS

Liberty Freedom

Labour Work

Aid Help

After the loss of Normandy to France, a strong nationalistic feeling took hold of some of the
most important members of the ruling class who were forced to choose between their land in
the Island (England) or in the continent (Normandy). Those who chose to remain in England
started to pay more attention to English as a way of claiming cultural identity different from
those who forced out from the French territories. New English Lords stopped opposing to
educate their offspring in both languages, English and French. The future bilingual generation
was beginning.

Normandy was now occupied by lords and peasant coming from the central and south part of
France, and with them, another dialect: the aforementioned Central French. France was still
the main commercial partner of the inhabitants of the Island but then, they had to deal with

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people who spoke a rather different variation of the French they had known. This new
dialectal variation also influenced the English language, especially in the spelling level.
Pronunciation was affected too.

English still did not have official status and regulation. English had become the third
language in its own country (after French and Latin). It was largely a spoken rather than
written language, a myriad distinct regional usages and dialects grew up, and indeed the
proliferation of regional dialects during this time was so extreme that people in one part of
England could not even understand people from another part just 50 miles away.

During this period is when basically all Old English inflections disappeared and syntactic
order started to become more relevant (with the absence of declension, word order was the
logical step in order to signal the relationship between words in a sentence). Progressive
tenses (-ing) made their appearance late in this period.

Finally, at the end of this period, after the Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453)
that had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy, the status of English rose
as a consequence. The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official language of the
courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French), was adopted in
1362, and in that same year Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in
English, a crucial psychological turning point. By 1385, English had become the language of
instruction in schools.

2.4 Early Modern English

Gone the Germanic complex morphology, gone the Germanic fashions in word compounding
and word derivation and, finally, gone many of the sounds of Old English, what remained is
what we have today: an English with a great quantity of monosyllabic words, sounds easier to
pronounce, and a simpler morphology.

By the 16th century English spelling was becoming increasingly out of step with
pronunciation.

2.4.1 Classic influence in English

Renaissance brought new discoveries and inventions that provided language with a new wave
of words. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and early 17th centuries and is
often referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare.” During this period
there was a great enthusiasm for the classical languages (Greek and Latin) and a huge number
of classical works were being translated into English, so many new terms were introduced
where an English equivalent did not exist. The new vocabulary was mainly related to the
scientific field and literature.

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There was even an excessive tendency to use Latin terms with the objective of making a text
more academic or in order to sound well-educated. The derogative “inkhorn” was coined to
describe pedantic writers who borrowed the classics to create obscure and opulent terms,
many of which have not survived. This obsession with classical terms affected spelling
greatly. Many scholars, while trying to fix the language, believed that it was necessary to
recover the classical spelling of some English words with Latin or Greek origin, without
regard of their phonetic or dialectal evolution.

2.4.2 Printing press and Standardization

The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing
press, one of the world’s great technological innovations; introduced into England by
William Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in
Germany around 1450). The printing press helped with the production and copying of books
and manuscripts, tasks that until that very moment had been made by hand. The faster mass
production of books made possible a decrease in books prices, so it was easier for the
recently illiterate general audience to acquire them.

At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within
England - Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands (a region which extended down to
include London), Southern and Kentish - and even within these demarcations, there was a
huge variety of different spellings. Thanks to this device spelling and grammar became more
fixed and the London dialect become the Standard English.

The first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was published by English schoolteacher
Robert Cawdrey in 1604. But the first dictionary considered reliable was Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. These were the first real serious
attempt to present a 'guide' about the proper use and spelling of words (far later than other
languages). Since the 16th century, there had been calls for the regulation and reform of what
was increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language. In addition to dictionaries, many
English grammars started to appear in the 18th century.

Bibliography

Aitchison, J. (2001). Language Change: Progress or Decay? (3rd edition), Cambridge University Press.

Barber, C., Beal J., & Shaw, P. (2009). The English Language: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Comrie, B. (ed.). (1987). The World’s Major Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeborn, D. (1998). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan Press LTD.

Kachru, B. & Nelson, C. (2009). The Handbook of World Englishes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Laks, B. (2008). Origins and Evolution of Languages. London: Equinox.

Millward, C. & Hayes, M. (2011). Workbook for Millward/Hayes' A Biography of the English
Language. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1996). How Writing Came About. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Schoenemann, P. T. (2012). Evolution of Brain and Language. In Michel A. Hofman, Dean Falk,
editors: Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 195 (p. 443-459), Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Trudgill, P., Chambers, J. & Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.). (2001). Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.

Web pages

http://www.angmohdan.com/the-root-of-all-human-languages/

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-Anglo-Saxon-countries

http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_old.html

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