The History of the English Language

The History of the English Language by Risa.




English has become the global language, it is not very old tough. We have knowledge of what should have been, but we don’t have records of it, and history is based on written records. The latest documents that we have today, date from the seventh century.

English arrived in England, during the fifth century. The only people that spoke the language were the Angles of the Saxons. That language was called “englisc”. When it arrived, latin was the most common language on the south and east. Some varieties of the Celtic language were in common in the West and Northwest.

English did not become the most common language until the tenth century, when Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, conquered all the kingdoms south of the Firth of Forth. Although the majority of documents written in Old English that have survived are in the West Saxon dialect of Alfred’s Wessex, modern English is descended from the dialect spoken and written in Mercia.

It is said that English is a stress language, stress is used on a syllable to distinguish words when spoken. The language, however, has a very strong tendency towards recessive accent. In other words, by the pass of the years, words tend to change. As for this, who knows what the future may bring; the apostrophe of ownership, as an example, might be lost entirely.

The natural tendency to move stress back have been the cause of the important change that occurried during the 15th and 16th centuries, and its known as the “Great Vowel Shift.” The vowel sounds also shifted back. Only dead languages do not change; English has changed, but the original core is still there.

Elizabethan English is different, yet not all the different. We may no longer say “thou” or “art” yet it is unlikely tht any modern reader would not understand Shakespeare’s “you art thou” to be

“where are you”. The fact that meanings shift too, its more important that the word “thou” that changed. When we say “we should go” we mean we have a choice, in Old English “should” meant there was no choice, “we must go”

English has been shifting meanings, and so on, and it would keep shifting words in the future.