Evolution of the English Language

Oh, mygawd, Wilso! Where does one start? The English language is classified as a Germanic language on that branch of the Indo-European tree which also includes German, Dutch and all the Scandinavian languages.

The Anglo-Saxon conquest of Celtic Britain took place ca. 450 c.e. They brought their proto-German language with them. At this time, and for the next couple of hundred years at least, the language spoken in England was virtually identical to that spoken by mainland Germanic peoples, including the Norse. Just different dialects, is all. By the time William the Bastard...er, Duke William of Normandy, that is... came ashore at Hastings in 1066, the dialect of the English was probably sufficiently different from their mainland cousins so as to be mutually unintelligible. (I could be wrong on this, as it seems that the hapless English had little difficulty communicating with the Norse raiders who plundered both England and Ireland, seemingly at will.)

With the coming of William the Conqueror's Normans to seats of power, Norman French became the language of the upper classes and the Anglo-Saxon dialect which we now call Old English fell into general disuse, except among the peasantry. But it never died out completely. The Normans found they had to learn some basic English in order to communicate with their subjects and the subjects, in turn, began adopting some French words and phrases to fit in among their 'betters.' In time, this fusion of Germanic Anglo-Saxon and Norman French blended into what we now call Middle English, from which Modern English is directly descended.

Many people incorrectly refer to the English of Geoffrey Chaucer as 'Old English.' It isn't. It's Midle English and damned close to the modern version. Linguists trace the beginings of Middle English to ca. 1200. But at that point in time it was still only an oral tongue. Any writings from this period are either in Norman French or in Latin. The first written evidence we have of the new language, this so-called Middle English, comes from roughly 1360-1400. This is the period of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the anonymous Piers Ploughman and the equally anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

So, in essence, modern English is a blend of a Germanic and a Romance tongue. It has some slight (very slight) traces of old Brittish (Celtic) words and additional vocabulary comes directly from the Latin, inserted there largely by clerics showing off their knowledge of the ancient tongue.

That is about as brief as one can get in describing the evolution of the English language. Need more detail? Let me know.

Cheers!