A Very Short History of the English Language

Origins of English and the fascination for language

It was entirely by accident that I found the joy in learning foreign languages. It came from an unexpected source as well, as it was during an English lesson while at secondary school. My school was fortunate enough to have some excellent and inspiring teachers and lessons were varied, so the theme of each lesson wasn’t always predictable. I turned up to this lesson, as normal, having had to remove my bag from my shoulder, as was the law when walking inside the corridors of a British comprehensive school, and settled down for another instalment of English language and literature.

We were in the middle of studying Shakespeare, another unbreakable norm at a British secondary school, when the subject turned to the words and phrases that Shakespeare was using – how different they were from those we use today, and how English had come on an incredibly long but interesting journey to arrive in its current ‘Modern English’ state. While we continued to study Shakespeare’s use of Elizabethan English, my mind had already wandered elsewhere – if it was so different from that era as compared to today, then what would it have been like another 500 years before that? What’s more, where did it all come from originally?

So, I stopped by after to ask the teacher – I know her as Mary these days – this question. Not a cool look, when you should be out on lunch, of course, but this had captured my imagination far too much to be concerned by that. At this point, the whole magic of languages was waking up in my mind and Mary retold the story of English.

The Ancient Britons, the Celts and the Romans

The narrative began with the observation that Modern English, as we speak it today, is actually fairly uniform. Accents do persist, but dialects, by and large, have all but died out. However, as Mary explained, when you go back in history, there were many varieties of our mother tongue. There was an English of the educated upper class, the elite, for one, and then a whole melting pot of many other versions of the language depending on the region or on class.

Unfortunately, much of the knowledge of these local variants has been lost. On the other hand, if we take English to mean the version of English spoken by the educated elite, or the history of ‘Standard English’ as we would describe it today, then we can trace its development to a certain extent.

A good starting point for the story is with the invasions of the Celts in around 500 BC. The Celts were a warrior tribe who conquered the Ancient Britons (who may also have been Celts) and claimed the British Isles as their own. Both the Ancient Britons and the Celts spoke varieties of an original language and thus their languages belong, as Standard English does today, to the Indo-European language family. This is a group of languages that have entrenched themselves across large swathes of Asia and Europe and also includes ancient tongues such as Sanskrit of India, and the Latin and Greek languages of Europe.

The original homeland of the Indo-Europeans and how their subsequent migrations unfolded across Eurasia remain a topic of scholarly investigation and debate. However, it is safe to say that even by 500 BC, Indo-European was no longer a single language and had evolved and split into branches that formed the basis of numerous mutually unintelligible languages.

The Romans arrived in the first century AD, often living alongside the Celts. Many Latin words were adopted during this time and Latin was embedded as a powerful, influential language through its use by the Church.

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes

When the Romans finally left about 400 years later, the country was open to attack from war-faring tribes that had settled along the coasts of Northern Europe, the marauding Angles, Saxons and Jutes. These newly arriving tribes drove the Celts to the fringes of the British Isles and came to inhabit large swathes of Britain. They spoke their own versions of the Indo-European family tree, which had branched off into a collection of ‘Germanic’ languages, themselves the forefathers of Modern German.

The most dominant influence was Saxon, driven by the establishment of Saxon kings across the island and Old English, also sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon put down its roots in the British Isles. Despite the Saxon grip on power, there continued to be invasions by the ferocious Norsemen of the north, the Vikings, who contributed further to the language of the Isles.

All of these influences gave rise to what we generally think of as Old English – in other words, the language of Alfred the Great of Wessex. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a manuscript that documented some of the main political events of the times, was created during the reign of Alfred the Great and copied many times for distribution to the monasteries across England.

Also, during this era, there was some extraordinary poetry crafted, which survive from the 8th to 11th centuries, including Beowulf, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. It was highly alliterative verse, which means it was characterised by the repetition of sounds. It was rich in imagery and relied on rhythm in its diction.

William the Conqueror and 1066

There was a major turning point. The year 1066 marked a defeat for the elite of Anglo-Saxon Britain and thus marks the beginning of the evolution of Old English into what we call Middle English. During this time, intermarriage and the establishment of a Norman French hierarchy living alongside the Anglo-Saxons defined a period in which a huge number of French loanwords made their way into the language of the Isles.

The structure of the language and the characteristic grammar of Old English also changed significantly at this point. With the addition of French, varieties of Old English, which had been used as a lingua-franca across many tribes, caused the already eroding word patterns, and the detail, to be rapidly swept aside in favour of merely making oneself understood.

The detail to be lost included many of the features that are still to be found in other languages, such as using a gender to describe nouns, or the extensive use endings on words (or inflections) to describe a word’s function in a sentence. All these characteristics became significantly streamlined during the evolution of Old to Middle English.

The form of Middle English that one spoke would depend heavily on the region in which one lived. London and the East Midlands were home to some of the most influential, educated and richest inhabitants of the island. William Caxton, living around 1422-1491 and the inventor of the printing press, belonged to this group and therefore the first printed forms of English reflected his home dialect, that of the East Midlands.

Middle English and Geoffrey Chaucer

One of the most famous and most extensive example of Middle English comes in Geoffrey Chaucer‘s (1343-1400) Canterbury Tales, which, as Mary warned me, was infamous because some of the tales were so rude. This is not to say that Chaucer was a scurrilous, or scandolous, writer. Chaucer was an extraordinarily able man, educated, well-travelled, inventive and a trusted diplomat. He’d probably be wryly amused to think that today he’s only known as a poet.

What he was doing, however, through the vehicle of the Canterbury Tales, was producing a sketch book of different English character types – the worldly nun, the priest, the knight, the experienced woman, the miller, and so forth. He achieved this by putting into their mouths a story that would reveal what each was like.

The framework for the storytelling was a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the journey provided the excuse for each character to tell their tale. Meanwhile, we catch a glimpse of fourteenth century life as Chaucer describes how the coming of spring makes the flowers grow, the birds sing and incites people to embark on holiday – or, in this case, the pilgrimage!

There is a wonderful mini-poem of eighteen lines at the beginning, which, echoes Anglo-Saxon poetry as it is highly alliterative and falls into two balanced halves. On the other hand, the introduction of rhyming in the Canterbury Tales reflects those traits from French and Italian (Latin) literature, revealing the coming together of these various cultural influences in Britain of that time.

The especially rude tales are those of the Miller and the Reeve. These are fairly low-life characters and their stories turn out to be vulgar. The Knight, in contrast, recites a long, wordy story of chivalric virtue. Meanwhile the Wife of Bath provides a hilarious account of her own long list of husbands, followed by a story of how a knight earned true happiness by sensibly allowing the woman to make all the important decisions!

The character Chaucer really loathes is the Pardoner, a supposed servant of the Church, who sold ‘pardons’ and false relics to ordinary folk who were simply anxious for their souls. The Pardoner is utterly ruthless and self-seeking, and condemns himself by his own conceited bragging. His techniques are those of the advertiser and propagandist.

Chaucer’s poetry is worth reading and the language, although problematic, once you are used to it, is not so different from Modern English, as the language was well on its way to its contemporary state by this time. Chaucer’s storytelling is superb, funny, moving and exciting and serves as a reminder that literature and language do not progress in the same way as technology progresses – language evolves, but it doesn’t necessarily improve, although it certainly never stays still!

The road to Modern English

After 1400, English becomes increasingly similar to today’s Standard English. While much vocabulary has changed, by the time we reach the age of William Shakespeare, the form of Modern English was settling down and Shakespeare belongs to the era commonly referred to as Early Modern English.

Accounts of events such as The Plague in London in 1665 are understandable for a modern reader. Prose style became much ‘wordier’ in the seventeenth century, which was a reflection of the increasing amount of leisure time for some. Interestingly, in Shakespeare, it is telling that lowlier characters use shorty, punchy sentences that are to the point, while the educated speak in longer, far more subtle sentences, with rhythms that reflect not just the meaning of the words but also their characters. The sound of communication mattered – the choice of words and phrases mattered.

The English of the early 19th century has a distinctly modern feel to it. Works published around the time of the Napoleonic Wars are far less long-winded and pompous in comparison to what comes later during Victorian times. Modern English continued to evolve to reflect changing tastes, styles and cultures. Charles Dickens, of course, was paid by volume, rather than by novel, hence the long spinning out of his stories that would have been published in monthly instalments.

A view from the 1990s

I was at school during the 1990s, and at that time, teachers would bemoan how the language of the time had descended into what Mary describes as “yob talk.” There is a nostalgic nod back here to a time when it seemed that people cared more about the way in which they spoke and how they wrote.

The perception was that English in the 90s was under attack from less articulate role models, from DJs on pop radio to vulgar talk on the television, from poor journalism and sensational best-sellers. In an age of mass communication, quality communication appeared to be being swamped by inferior alternatives. At that time, the hashtag existed merely as a button on a landline telephone with a function that no ordinary user could fathom, other than to neatly finish off the keypad in a space that would otherwise remain empty.

Of course, now, 30 years or more later, the same criticisms could be levelled at much of the new media that have come since, those driven by the rise of the internet. Nevertheless, this look into the past sparked my interest in continuing to learn about how language and culture each influence the other, how learning about the history of ones own language opens the door to foreign languages; and how, most importantly, the act of taking on the learning of another language helps to understand and make sense of the world in this era of mass communication.

The debate about whether language is changing for the better or for the worse is a debate for another time, however the inextricable link between language and the techniques that are used to deploy it underpin the genesis of this website, Lexicogs – to provide not only the tools for effective communication but to understand how it relates to the cultural contexts in which language is used today.