How Has The English Language Changed Over Time

Language is known as the intricate and complex structure consisting of a body of words that expresses thoughts and feelings. Nobody knows indefinitely how language started, However, many theories have been observed including: God’s gift to mankind, The monogenetic theory, the bow-wow theory, and grunting. Billions of words were spoken before any were written. Language history has changed overtime from starting with pictograms and Ideograms which were pictures and symbols drawn over 20,000 years ago, to the Alphabet created by the ancient Greeks to represent sound units. Today, English has developed to over seventy-five different countries and has 400 million people speaking the English language today. The development of the English language

“Old English began with the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes tribes. Around 450 CE, they began to invade the island known as Britannia.” (Dawe and Malott 374). The Angles, Saxons, and Jute all knew a few words from a language called Low-Germanic and later, once the tribes combined their languages and learned new words, changed their language to Anglo-Saxon or Old English. After this language was created, literature and poems expanded across the Old English period. The most important poem created was called Beowulf. “When Beowulf was finally set down in writing in the eleventh century, it marked the birth of English Literature.” (376). Beowulf was written by an unknown author in the year 1000 and was about a hero vs a monster. Although Old English marked the beginning of the language, the next era changed the language for the forever

“A dramatic step in the evolution of the English language came after yet another conquest of England, this one by the French in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings.”(377). For the next three years, the official language of England was French. The French soldiers fell in love with the Anglo-Saxon women and wanted a way to communicate with them. They were not allowed to teach them French and they were not allowed to learn Anglo-Saxon. They decided to put their languages together to make a way to communicate from this point on. The era of Middle English was influenced by a poet named Gregory Chaucer. Chaucer’s writing formed Old English and French together. “His masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, was written in 1380, consists of stories told by characters on a religious pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Canterbury.” (378). The concluding era has changed the way English was written and completely re-established English literature forever. The last and most recent era in the development of the English language was the Modern Era which began in 1485 and runs into the present. In Modern English, words began to be written differently and words began to be spoken differently. “Nobody knows why the Great Vowel Shift happened, but over the course of 200 years, a change in vowel sounds altered the pronunciation of many words. (381). The human tongue came up further than ever before which changed