Where Does the English Language Come From?

English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, making it a relative of Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages. It arrived in Britain with Angles, Saxons and Jutes from the fifth century onwards.

The name comes from the Angles. Old English is unreadable to a modern speaker without study, yet the most frequently used words in the language today still come from this layer: the, and, is, have, man, house, water, eat, sleep.

Viking raids from the late eighth century, then settlement from the ninth, brought Old Norse into contact with Old English. The two were related closely enough for partial mutual understanding, which produced an unusual kind of borrowing.

English took in everyday Norse words including sky, egg, knife, window, leg, husband and both, and remarkably it also borrowed the pronouns they, them and their. Pronouns are normally very resistant to borrowing, and their replacement here suggests unusually deep contact between the two communities.

The Norman conquest of 1066 installed French as the language of court, law and administration for around three centuries. English continued as the language of ordinary people and absorbed a vast French vocabulary.

This produced the characteristic layering of English:

• •Animals kept by English speakers, cow and pig, served as French derived beef and pork
• •Plain words alongside formal equivalents: begin and commence, ask and enquire
• •A legal vocabulary that is overwhelmingly French in origin
• •Roughly a third of English vocabulary traceable to French

Latin entered in several waves: through early church influence, then heavily during the Renaissance when scholars borrowed directly for scientific and academic purposes. Greek arrived largely through Latin and later through scientific coinage.

English then kept borrowing as its speakers travelled and traded, taking words from Arabic, Hindi, Malay, Nahuatl, Japanese and many others. The result is a vocabulary far larger and more mixed than most languages, with several words available for many concepts at different registers.

Two causes account for most of it. First, spelling was becoming fixed by printing at exactly the time pronunciation was undergoing a major shift in long vowels, so spellings froze while sounds moved on.

Second, borrowed words often kept spelling conventions from their source language, which is why English contains several different systems at once. Some spellings were also altered deliberately by scholars trying to signal Latin origins, which is how the silent b in debt arrived, and occasionally wrongly, as with the s in island.

English is not widespread because of anything about the language itself. Languages do not spread because they are simple, logical or expressive, and English is not notably any of those.

It spread through the reach of the British Empire, which established it across North America, South Asia, Africa and Oceania, and then through the economic, scientific and cultural weight of the United States in the twentieth century. Latin, Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin all spread by similar mechanisms. The lesson from historical linguistics is consistent: language spread follows power, not linguistic merit.

How do we know English is related to languages as different as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit? In 1786 William Jones, a British judge in India, observed that Sanskrit shared so many similarities with Greek and Latin, in roots and grammar, that they must have sprung from a common source that may no longer exist. Later scholars made that idea rigorous by looking for regular sound correspondences: systematic patterns where a sound in one language matches a different sound in another, word after word. Random resemblances do not behave like that.

The most famous pattern is Grimm's law, described by Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm in the early nineteenth century. It shows that where Latin and Greek kept a p, t or k sound, the Germanic languages, including English, regularly changed it to f, th or h. Compare Latin pater with father, pes and its stem ped with foot, tres with three, and cornu with horn. Because the changes are regular, linguists can use them to reconstruct parts of the ancestral language, Proto-Indo-European, even though no written record of it survives.

Old English worked more like modern German. Nouns belonged to one of three genders and changed their endings to show their role in a sentence, so the ending told you who was doing what to whom. Because of that, word order could be fairly flexible. Traces survive in modern English. The ordinary plural ending s goes back to one Old English pattern, as in stan, meaning stone, and its plural stanas. A few nouns kept other old plural forms, which is why we still say oxen and children. Pronouns kept the most, so we still distinguish he, him and his.

Most of the endings faded during the late Old English and Middle English periods. Unstressed final syllables weakened into a vague vowel and were then often dropped, so different endings fell together and stopped carrying information. Contact with Norse speakers probably sped this up, since the two languages often shared word roots but not endings. With the endings gone, word order took over their job. The dog bit the man and the man bit the dog now mean different things only because of the order of the words. A similar tidying made many verbs regular, which is why the old past tense holp gave way to helped.

The spelling of words like bite, meet, name and house makes more sense once you know how they sounded around 1400, in Chaucer's day. Bite was pronounced roughly like modern beet, meet roughly like mate, name with an ah sound like the start of father, and house like hoos. Between about the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries the long vowels of southern English moved in a chain: most were pronounced higher in the mouth, and the two highest, in bite and house, became the gliding sounds used today. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen later named this the Great Vowel Shift.

Nobody recorded the shift on tape, so linguists reconstruct it from several kinds of evidence. Poets' rhymes show which words sounded alike in a given period. Ordinary letter writers, who often spelled by ear, leave clues in their mistakes. Sixteenth-century spelling reformers such as John Hart tried to describe pronunciation precisely in order to argue for new spellings. Regional speech helps too: in Scots and some northern English dialects the vowel in house never shifted, which is why hoose survives there. Printed spellings, fixed while the sounds were moving, now act like a fossil of the older pronunciation.

English began as a Germanic language, absorbed Norse through Viking settlement and French after 1066, then borrowed heavily from Latin and the wider world, and that layering explains both its enormous vocabulary and its inconsistent spelling.