Periods
Celtic Speaking Tribes:
The Celtic-speaking
tribes were the original
inhabitants of the British Isles
before the arrival of Romans.
Many dialect existed
among the Celtics as they
didn't live within defined borders.
It was nearly impossible to
communicate between
people with different dialects.
E.g. River names: 'Thames' 'Don',
'Esk', 'Wye'
'tor' = 'hill', 'pen' = 'top', 'crag' = rockThe Romans:
The Romans did
not seek to impose
their language,
at least by force.
In the years
immediately after
the invasion, many
of the more ambitious
native Britons chose
to learn Latin in order
to conduct business
with the Romans.
As time passed, many
Britons would have grown
up in Latin-speaking
households, or would have
been bilingual to some extent.
E.g. 'planta' = 'plant', 'win' = 'wine'
'forca' = 'fork', 'straet' = 'road'The Angles, Saxons and Jutes:
Missionaries travelled around the country
converting
communities from their pagan rituals to
Christian beliefs.
The Angles, Saxon and Jutes, more
commonly known as the
Anglo-Saxons, came from Denmark,
northern Germany and
northern Holland.
Their branch of the language tree was one
of three collectively
called Germanic: • North Germanic
– Icelandic, Faeroese,
Norwegian, Danish, Swedish
• East Germanic – Gothic
• West Germanic – English, Frisian, Flemish,
Dutch, GermaThe Vikings - Norsemen and Danes:
These invaders from Sweden,
Norway & Denmark, collectively
known as ‘Vikings’ , ‘Norsemen’ or ‘Danes’
brought with them their own language
– ‘Old Norse’ – which was also Germanic.
After a series of battles with the English
armies, the Viking invaders settled in the
north and east of England, a region that
would later become known as ‘Danelaw’.
Over time, as trade increased and
inter-marriage occurred, Old English
speaking communities began to absorb Norse
wordsThe Normans:
The Normans were descendants
of Norsemen who hadbeen granted
land in northern France. They no
longer spoke a Germanic tongue
but a dialect of Old French.
England became in effect a
trilingual country:
The upper classes spoke and
wrote a form of Norman French.
The lower classes continued to
speak forms of Old English. The
law, the church, and affairs of state
were conducted in French and Latin.
The blending of Norman French
with Old English greatly increased
the store of vocabulary Geoffrey Chaucer:
By the end of the
fourteenth century,
as Norman political
power diminished in both
England and France,
Englishonce again
became the dominant language
in Britain, although it consisted
of a number of different dialects.
Two significant factors assisted
this: • The popularity of works
by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote
in the London dialect. • The
invention of the printing press
in 1440 by Johannes Guttenberg
and its subsequent use in England
by William Caxton (1422–91),
who publiThe Great Vowel Shift:
The transition from
‘Middle English’ to ‘Early
Modern English’ is associated
in part with what is known as
‘the Great Vowel Shift’.
Not only did this shift change
how long vowels were articulated
and how they sounded, but also
the way in which words containing
them were written, which affected their spelling.
These changes would form the basis
of ‘Modern English’
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