Where was the English language born?

Question

Did the Ancient Romans contribute to it? Or where did it come from? I know alot of our words have Latin in them so I would assume the Romans did contribute to it.

Answer 1

No, Bubbles. English was born in England.
Even if the Ancient Romans conquered what is today England, posterior invasions erased the Latin and most of the Roman civilization.
After the Western Roman Empire fell in 476, different Germanic tribes invaded England, among them the Anglos, the Saxons, and others. From these tribes came the principal root of the current English language.
What you mention about Latin words can be explained as an English teacher told me once: the English has been made as an old suit, with many pieces from different languages.
After the old Anglosaxon language, in 1066 William, Duke of Normandy conquered England and declared the French as official language of England. Even the king Edward III, in the XIV century spoke French and refused to speak English.
It took a long time for both languages to fuse and that is why the present English has a number of words from French, and perhaps also from Latin, included in the French

Answer 2

Very comprehensive answer from Caicos.

I would just add that languages are in constant development, so it is hard to say when any particular language began to be spoken; but at some point in the two or three centuries after the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England, their varius dialects had begun to merge, and at the same time to diverge from the Continental dialects, sufficiently that people became aware of a distinctive Insular language - English.

It is sadly incorrect to say that Wales was never invaded - the reason most Welsh people speak English rather than Welsh.

As for the Roman influence on English, there were a few words that were borrowed into the Germanic ancestor of English before the Anglo-Saxons came to England - words like Mill, Street, Wine, Pan, Cook, Kitchen, Kiln, and Mint, were probably all already "English" words borrowed from Latin before the setlerrs came to England.

Answer 3

English was "born" on the North Sea coast area as North Sea Germanic. These people split into four groups - Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians. The first three moved over to Britain and the fourth (Frisians) stayed on the continent. The language in Britain was influenced only slightly by Celtic and Latin and much more so by Danes who invaded the island later. The main Latin influences came from Norman French after 1066 and in subsequent borrowings and coinages from Latin, continuing up to today.

The Frisians who stayed behind still speak Frisian, the language most closely related to English.

Answer 4

There was a great influx of Germanic tribes called the ' Angles ' and the ' Saxons '. Too, most of the European languages, including Celtic and the Northern, countries are also referred to as being ' Indo European '. With the singular exception of Basque. Which has no known, discernible connection to any spoken language anywhere and reputed to be the oldest since before Roman times.

Answer 5

err the English language was born in a pace called England it is a mixture of languages including Norman (french), Latin, Anglo Saxon, Viking hence there are several words to describe the same thing Big vs Large. Bacon, pork, ham, pigmeat and of course the reproductive parts of the body.

As Wales has never been invaded our language is purer (if shorter / fewer / less words) it contains no swear words and is the oldest language in Europe

Diolch yn fawr

Answer 6

the english language it's a mixed of celtic,french and latin as well norse it was a language from Vikings Invaders.. the english it comes crom England.. as you know the celtic language was the first language in that country.. after some centuries the romans came to the Island..the celtic survived in some places and Latin gained territories..then there was a mixed between these languages.. after that the Invanders from Escandinavian like Vikings.. they arrived to the Island they had a language called Norse..it was another influenced.. finally we have the Norman Invasion from France.. another influenced.. later we have a shakeaspare the english poet who started to make a Standar english during the years of Reinancesse .. during this time we have the first works in a standar english.. like shakeapeare books and Bibles..there four english periods.. old english.. middle english Early Modern english and Modern English

Answer 7

It's never easy to pinpoint exactly when a specific language began, but in the case of English we can at least say that there is little sense in speaking of the English language as a separate entity before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Little is known of this period with any certainty, but we do know that Germanic invaders came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. The invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic (related to what emerged as Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages, and to Gothic), but we'll probably never know how different their speech was from that of their continental neighbours. However it is fairly certain that many of the settlers would have spoken in exactly the same way as some of their north European neighbours, and that not all of the settlers would have spoken in the same way.

The reason that we know so little about the linguistic situation in this period is because we do not have much in the way of written records from any of the Germanic languages of north-western Europe until several centuries later. When Old English writings begin to appear in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries there is a good deal of regional variation, but not substantially more than that found in later periods. This was the language that Alfred the Great referred to as ‘English’ in the ninth century.

The Celts were already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, but there are few obvious traces of their language in English today. Some scholars have suggested that the Celtic tongue might have had an underlying influence on the grammatical development of English, particularly in some parts of the country, but this is highly speculative. The number of loanwords known for certain to have entered Old English from this source is very small. Those that survive in modern English include brock (badger), and coomb a type of valley, alongside many place names.

The next invaders were the Norsemen. From the middle of the ninth century large numbers of Norse invaders settled in Britain, particularly in northern and eastern areas, and in the eleventh century the whole of England had a Danish king, Canute. The distinct North Germanic speech of the Norsemen had great influence on English, most obviously seen in the words that English has borrowed from this source. These include some very basic words such as take and even grammatical words such as they. The common Germanic base of the two languages meant that there were still many similarities between Old English and the language of the invaders. Some words, for example give perhaps show a kind of hybridization with some spellings going back to Old English and others being Norse in origin. However, the resemblances between the two languages are so great that in many cases it is impossible to be sure of the exact ancestry of a particular word or spelling. However, much of the influence of Norse, including the vast majority of the loanwords, does not appear in written English until after the next great historical and cultural upheaval, the Norman Conquest.

The centuries after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language. In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the written language. Old English, like German today, showed a tendency to find native equivalents for foreign words and phrases (although both Old English and modern German show plenty of loanwords), whereas Middle English acquired the habit that modern English retains today of readily accommodating foreign words. Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to another with ease. One only has to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the writings of the ancient world.

The late medieval and early modern periods saw a fairly steady process of standardization in English south of the Scottish border. The written and spoken language of London continued to evolve and gradually began to have a greater influence in the country at large. For most of the Middle English period a dialect was simply what was spoken in a particular area, which would normally be more or less represented in writing - although where and from whom the writer had learnt how to write were also important. It was only when the broadly London standard began to dominate, especially through the new technology of printing, that the other regional varieties of the language began to be seen as different in kind. As the London standard became used more widely, especially in more formal contexts and particularly amongst the more elevated members of society, the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized, as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education.

In the same period a series of changes also occurred in English pronunciation (though not uniformly in all dialects), which go under the collective name of the Great Vowel Shift. These were purely linguistic ‘sound changes’ which occur in every language in every period of history. The changes in pronunciation weren’t the result of specific social or historical factors, but social and historical factors would have helped to spread the results of the changes. As a result the so-called ‘pure’ vowel sounds which still characterise many continental languages were lost to English. The phonetic pairings of most long and short vowel sounds were also lost, which gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and which now obscure the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts.

During the medieval and early modern periods the influence of English spread throughout the British Isles, and from the early seventeenth century onwards its influence began to be felt throughout the world. The complex processes of exploration, colonization and overseas trade that characterized Britain’s external relations for several centuries became agents for change in the English language. This wasn’t simply through the acquisition of loanwords deriving from languages from every corner of the world, which in many cases only entered English via the languages of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, but through the gradual development of new varieties of English, each with their own nuances of vocabulary and grammar and their own distinct pronunciations. More recently still, English has become a lingua franca, a global language, regularly used and understood by many nations for whom English is not their first language. (For further information on this see the pages on Global English on this site). The eventual effects on the English language of both of these developments can only be guessed at today, but there can be little doubt that they will be as important as anything that has happened to English in the past sixteen hundred years.