Five Events in The History of English

Five Events that Shaped the History of English are:

Philip Durkin, Principal etymologist at the Oxford English Dictionary, chooses five events that shaped the English Language.

The Anglo-Saxon Settlement :


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.

brock (badger) and coomb a type of valley alongside many place names.

The Scandinavian Settlements :


1066 and after 1066 and all that :

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. One only has 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 :


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 became agents for change in the English language. This wasn’t simply through the acquisition of loanwords deriving from languages from every corner of the world which in many cases only entered English via the languages of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, but through the gradual development of new varieties of English each with its own nuances of vocabulary and grammar and its own distinct pronunciations. More recently still, English has become a

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