The English Language

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Recommended: Historical Perspective Of English Language

The English language as many other languages in the World has been evolving through time, and it passed through many stages including its nearly extinction. So where and when did this story begin? 2000 years ago in what now would be the United Kingdom, the language was incomprehensible. The Anglo-Saxon, wich is known also as Old English, was a language that sounded like the modern Frisian language. This language arrived when Germanic tribes invaded Britain and subjugated the native Celts. Nowadays some words have stayed more or less the same down the centuries, words like: buter (butter), brea (bread), tsiis (cheese) miel (meal), sliepe (sleep), boat (boat), snie (snow), see (sea), stoarm (storm). It was the west Germanic tribes which invented these words. Anglo-Saxon, we all speak it every day; nouns like: youth, son, daughter, field, friend, home and ground; prepositions: in, on into, by, and from. And, an; come from Old English, so as all the numbers and verbs like: drink, come, go, sing, like, and love.

Britain was devided in several kingdoms: Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. During the 6th and 7th centuries, Christian missionaries brought the Latin language, thus the Anglo-Saxon absorbed Latin words which helped the language evolve. The Christian missionaries brought the Latin alphabet which later on would become the primary means of writing Anglo-Saxon.

Beowulf was the first great rite poem written in Old English; since its appearance, it marked the beginning of a glorious tradition which would lead to Chaucer, Shakespeare and beyond. With this poem the descriptive and narrative power is revealed; the poem describes the glorious times of the hero Beowulf from the Geats.

The language ...

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...nguage of the streets was not allowed in Jane Austen’s world.

During the late 18th and 19th century, came the Inustrial Revolution with its new words to enrich the English language; not only did it change the language, but it changed the world too. The steam engine changed the meaning words like "train", "locomotive", and "tracks" so that they could fit with the new technology. There was a change in society too, “Cockney rhyming slang” appeared and became a new form of speech used by the lower class.

Today English circles the globe, it inhabits the air we breath. What started as a guttural tribal dialect simile isolated in a small island is now the language of well over a thousand million people around the world. The story of the english language is an extraordinary one, tenacity, luck near extinction, dazzling flexibility and an extraordinary power to absolve.

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