Philip Durkin,
Principal Etymologist at the Oxford English Dictionary, chooses five
events that shaped the English Language.
he Anglo-Saxon Settlement
It's never easy
to pinpoint exactly when a specific language began, but in the case of English
we can at least say that there is little sense in speaking of the English
language as a separate entity before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Little
is known of this period with any certainty, but we do know that Germanic
invaders came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of
continental Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. The invaders all spoke a
language that was Germanic (related to what emerged as Dutch, Frisian, German
and the Scandinavian languages, and to Gothic), but we'll probably never know
how different their speech was from that of their continental neighbours.
However it is fairly certain that many of the settlers would have spoken in
exactly the same way as some of their north European neighbours, and that not
all of the settlers would have spoken in the same way.
The reason that
we know so little about the linguistic situation in this period is because we
do not have much in the way of written records from any of the Germanic
languages of north-western Europe until several centuries later. When Old
English writings begin to appear in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries
there is a good deal of regional variation, but not substantially more than
that found in later periods. This was the language that Alfred the Great
referred to as ‘English’ in the ninth century.
The Celts were
already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, but there are few
obvious traces of their language in English today. Some scholars have suggested
that the Celtic tongue might have had an underlying influence on the
grammatical development of English, particularly in some parts of the country,
but this is highly speculative. The number of loanwords known for certain to
have entered Old English from this source is very small. Those that survive in
modern English include brock (badger), and coomb a type of
valley, alongside many place names.
The Scandinavian Settlements
The next
invaders were the Norsemen. From the middle of the ninth century large numbers
of Norse invaders settled in Britain, particularly in northern and eastern
areas, and in the eleventh century the whole of England had a Danish king,
Canute. The distinct North Germanic speech of the Norsemen had great influence
on English, most obviously seen in the words that English has borrowed from
this source. These include some very basic words such as take and even
grammatical words such as they. The common Germanic base of the two
languages meant that there were still many similarities between Old English and
the language of the invaders. Some words, for example give, perhaps show
a kind of hybridization with some spellings going back to Old English and
others being Norse in origin. However, the resemblances between the two
languages are so great that in many cases it is impossible to be sure of the
exact ancestry of a particular word or spelling. However, much of the influence
of Norse, including the vast majority of the loanwords, does not appear in
written English until after the next great historical and cultural upheaval,
the Norman Conquest.
1066 and after
The centuries
after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language.
In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich
inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is
broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English
makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the
language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous
numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian
loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the
written language. Old English, like German today, showed a tendency to find
native equivalents for foreign words and phrases (although both Old English and
modern German show plenty of loanwords), whereas Middle English acquired the
habit that modern English retains today of readily accommodating foreign words.
Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of
business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to
another with ease. You only have to flick through the etymologies of any English
dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English
from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to
continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the
writings of the ancient world.
Standardization
The late
medieval and early modern periods saw a fairly steady process of
standardization in English south of the Scottish border. The written and spoken
language of London continued to evolve and gradually began to have a greater
influence in the country at large. For most of the Middle English period a
dialect was simply what was spoken in a particular area, which would normally
be more or less represented in writing - although where and from whom the
writer had learnt how to write were also important. It was only when the
broadly London standard began to dominate, especially through the new
technology of printing, that the other regional varieties of the language began
to be seen as different in kind. As the London standard became used more
widely, especially in more formal contexts and particularly amongst the more
elevated members of society, the other regional varieties came to be
stigmatized, as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education.
In the same
period a series of changes also occurred in English pronunciation (though not
uniformly in all dialects), which go under the collective name of the Great
Vowel Shift. These were purely linguistic ‘sound changes’ which occur in every
language in every period of history. The changes in pronunciation weren’t the
result of specific social or historical factors, but social and historical
factors would have helped to spread the results of the changes. As a result the
so-called ‘pure’ vowel sounds which still characterize many continental
languages were lost to English. The phonetic pairings of most long and short
vowel sounds were also lost, which gave rise to many of the oddities of English
pronunciation, and which now obscure the relationships between many English words
and their foreign counterparts.
Colonization and Globalization
During the
medieval and early modern periods the influence of English spread throughout
the British Isles, and from the early seventeenth century onwards its influence
began to be felt throughout the world. The complex processes of exploration,
colonization and overseas trade that characterized Britain’s external relations
for several centuries led to significant change in English. Words were absorbed
from all over the world, often via the languages of other trading and imperial
nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. At the same time, new
varieties of English emerged, each with their own nuances of vocabulary and
grammar and their own distinct pronunciations. More recently still, English has
become a lingua franca, a global language, regularly used and understood
by many nations for whom English is not their first language. The eventual
effects on the English language of both of these developments can only be
guessed at today, but there can be little doubt that they will be as important
as anything that has happened to English in the past sixteen hundred years.
From: http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-history-of-english
