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Five Factors or Historical Events Which Influenced the English Language

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Five Factors or Historical Events which Influenced the English Language

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages as well as most of the European languages spoken today. Latin and the modern Romance languages, Greek, the Germanic languages, Indo-Iranian languages, Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic languages are a part of the Indo-European family. English is in the Germanic group of languages; West Germanic is the ancestor of modern Dutch, German, Flemish, Frisian and English. The Gaelic-speaking Celts were one of the earliest people to migrate westward and they were natives of the British Isles long before the English (McCrum 48). “The Celtic Britons had the misfortune to inhabit an island that was highly desirable for both its agriculture and for its minerals.”(p.52) The Angles, Saxons and the Jutes were the first invaders of the British Isles and they caused the Britons to flee to the west. The Angles, Saxons and the jutes mixed their different Germanic dialects and formed what linguists now refer to as Old English or Anglo-Saxon. “Englisc’ was Old English for English, and it comes from the name of the Angles. “The basic building blocks of an English sentence- the, is, you and- are Anglo-Saxon. It is impossible to write a modern sentence without using a feast of Anglo-Saxon words.”(p.58) The Anglo-Saxons were the first speakers of English, but the English they spoke is very much different from what we speak today and it is unintelligible to modern ears. This is an indication that along English’s journey through the years, there were events that occurred to change the language from what it was then to what it is now. The arrival of Christianity in England,Viking invasions and Alfred the Great, the Norman Conquest, the industrial revolution and rise of the technological society, and the rise of the British Empire and global trade are factors and historical

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