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Emergence of englishes
Brief notes on the origin of the English language
Brief notes on the origin of the English language
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Definition of the word English:
English is derived from England, one would think. But in fact the language name is found long before the country name.The latter first appears as Englaland around the year 1000, and means "the land of the Engle," that is, the Angles. The Angles,Saxons, and Jutes were the three Germanic tribes who emigrated from what is now Denmark and northern Germany and settled inEngland beginning about the fourth century A.D. Early on, the Angles enjoyed a rise to power that must have made them seem moreimportant than the other two tribes, for all three tribes are indiscriminately referred to in early documents as Angles. The speech of thethree tribes was conflated in the same way: they all spoke what would have been called
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Germanic settlers brought in a variety of Germanic dialects in the Island. Literature had started to appear in AD 700 and the English language had then borrowed many words the Latin language due to the invasion and language of the church.
3- Later Old English ( 850 -1100)
The invasion of the Germanic tribes spoke similar languages to what was already distributed on the island and had become the culture of the people. At that time Britain had developed these languages and has become to what we are familiar with as Old English. Old English has nothing to do with the English Language we know today.
4- Middle English ( 1100-1450)
During this period the English Language was infected by the Norman Conquest who had later invaded and conquered the British Island. The new invaders were called (Normans). These invaders had brought with them the French Language which later became the language of the court and the official language. The English Vocabulary and spelling was now affected by the Normans. The lower class were known as the English speaking people and French was only spoken by the upper class. In the 14th century English returned to be the ruling language but with French words and spellings still added into the English
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Latin and French were spoken by the church and the language of science and the government was English. English was then spread across to America, Australia, and India.
The process of slave trading of English speaking Africans from England to America spread the English creoles. The Americans attempted to standardize and fix the language with use of dictionaries and grammar here they wanted to create their own identity of English. The American created their own identity by taking words from the British English and changing the style of spelling into their own and that’s how the American spelling became different than the British spelling of certain words. They choose to create their own identity of English. Even the pronunciation of certain words relates to the identity of English.
A big boost in English standardization was the typographic identity. Spelling and grammar became fixed in London including the dialect of English was the one in London that was considered to be the standard dialect. The first dictionary published was in London in the year 1604.
6- Modern English
According to Wiki, one theory states, “The Anglo Saxon originated from from Frisia. Afterwards, the script was used throughout England.”
Noah Webster, familiar to most Americans as the writer of the first American dictionary, worked as a schoolteacher in the late eighteenth century. As he taught, he came to realize that there were some major problems with the way English was taught in the American schools. The United States of America had recently declared its independence from England, and was struggling to form its own identity. The schools were still using textbooks from England, and these books varied in consistency when it came to spelling, pronunciation and grammar (Short Summary Website). As a teacher, and as a patriot, Webster felt a need for an American textbook. He wanted consistency and he wanted it to reflect that there was an American dialect of English that was distinctive from that of England (Bett Website). He had also noted that the social classes of England were often distinguished by differences in dialect, and he wished the United States to have a single, distinctive dialect that would rise above differences in class (Bett Website).
This is not all though, in the colonies, the language became very uniform. It became so uniform that it was almost identical across all of the colonies and all of the social classes. “The linguistic uniformity of America is geographic… and social.” (Boorstin 272) This happened both out of necessity, and as a result of the lifestyle of the colonists. In the colonies people moved around a lot, this meant that both they spread their particular dialect this caused a melding of all of the varying dialects of English from England. As they moved they also had to be able to communicate with people Wherever they went. This resulted in a very stable and uniform form of English that developed in the colonies, much more uniform than anything that could be found in England at the time. This form of English picked up a surprisingly small number of words from the
In the beginning of this class I had my doubts, I was unsure, confused, and discouraged. I
The millions of people who lived in the Roman Empire spoke many languages and followed many different customs and religions. But the Roman Empire bound them together under a common system of law and government. The languages of the ancient Romans, Latin, became the basis of French, Italian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages.
One of the many permutations that language has made is into what is collectively known as English. This particular tongue was brought to the British Isles in the Sixth Century CE by Northern Europeans or “Germanic” people. (Kemmer) It followed English colonists around the world, including areas in North America, which will be the subject of this essay.
The English language has a long history of changes through contact with other cultures, mainly by the many invasions on the earliest inhabitants of what is now England. From the Romans to the Germanics, and the Vikings to the Normans, each group of invaders have left their own unique mark on the English language. However, out of all the invaders, the Norman Conquest of 1066 had the most powerful effect on the development of English. They contributed a large number of French lexemes to the English lexicon affecting the semantics of many Old English lexemes. As the ruling class, their preference for French influenced the spelling system of the time as English became the language of the poor, resulting in an inconsistent orthography.
how the English language has changed in the many years from then until now. The
In Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson argues the importance of preserving language. Other dialects had a produced their own dictionaries, such as the French and Italians. Various writers of the eighteenth century were alarmed at the fact that there was no standard for the English language, since there was no standard it could easily become extinct. Johnson explored many points, such as how and why languages change as well as how many words are formed.
The Anglo Saxon period is the oldest known period of time that had a complex culture with stable government, art, and a fairly large amount of literature. Many people believe that the culture then was extremely unsophisticated, but it was actually extremely advanced for the time. Despite the many advancements, the period was almost always in a state of war. Despite this fact, the Anglo-Saxon period is a time filled with great advancements and discoveries in culture, society, government, religion, literature, and art.
During the semester, I have gained so much knowledge about the course, English 1301, which I did not know. Writing and Reading have so much elements into their process. My opinion about English has changed dramatically due to this course.
In Britain the way the speak and the way they act has something to do with their culture. They like to have a cultural emphasis of language, meaning they like to emphasize words that are adaptively important in their culture. The culture itself shows how it is different and why it is different from any other in the world. American English is much more homogenous than British English, meaning it is often harder to tell where in the USA someone is from just by hearing their accent. Linguists have identified somewhere between six and twenty-five American dialects, although the major divisions are between Northern, Midland and Southern dialects, which are roughly grouped together. In the US and in Britain we have what is known as an open communication system meaning, we can communicate with new sounds or words by combining two or more existing sounds or
The English language arose from the early Anglo Saxon inhabitants in ancient England and spread to Scotland and other European countries via the British Empire and later to the United States through colonial political and economical influences. It later dispersed to other parts of the world through these same influences to become one of the leading languages of the world. It has over the years developed by adopting different dialects to create a language, which is the standard lingual Franca in many countries. The rapid growth of the English language and its adoption by different cultures across the globe is sufficient ground to make it the global language.
The Norman invasion of 1066 AD began a period of two centuries in which French was the official language of England, resulting in the introduction of many words with French or Latin roots, such as 'baron', 'justice' and 'government' (Beal, J. 2012, p. 64). English was first used in Parliament in 1362 AD and gradually displaced French (Appendix I, in Seargea...
The 1400 mark date that English is used in writing will be, a seemingly small step, but one that impacted many people and began a legacy of record keeping in English. In 1450 English became the language used in writing town laws and finally 1489 saw all statutes written in English. But it was not until 1649 that English became the language of legal documents in place of Latin. The formal rules intended to keep the use of French in official capacities were not enough to combat the effects of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War between France and England, which both contributed greatly to the rise of English and fall of French. By the fourteenth century, English was again known by most people, although French was not forgotten, and the people who spoke French were generally bilingual.