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Have you ever thought about the real origin story of the English language?
Now, I get comments all of the time going, “call it English, not British English,” which is essentially meant to call out the fact that English originated in England and the other “dialects”, ie, American English, Australian English, etc, are seemingly not the OG language, which, you know, is correct – English was spread to the British colonies, who then made their own twist on it, but did English actually originate from England?
And the answer is – kind of. Let’s compare it to a lasagna.
You’re like, where in the world is this going?
Let’s say you make a lasagna at your house, with pasta, sauce, cheese, etc. It comes out of the oven and you take it over to a friend’s house.
You could say that that lasagna came from your house – the complete dish of the lasagna came from your kitchen.
You can’t deny that.
But if you want to dive into the lasagna, then no, it didn’t – the cheese, pasta, and sauce ingredients probably came from a grocery store, which came from other sources.
English is like lasagna.
English in its modern, all mixed together form, does come from England. But the ingredients that originally made up English didn’t come from England at all – they came from migrants!
History of English
England is known as a West Germanic language – it actually originated from languages brought over in the mid 5th to 7th centuries from the areas around northwest Germany, southern Denmark, and the Netherlands.
You had 3 main tribes, the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons – with the Jutes in Kent, the Saxons in the south west, and the Angles with the rest of the country – the Angles dominated most of the land, and the name of the country started as “Engla land.”
Before their arrival, the language was a combination of Latin, brought by the Romans, and celtic languages.
You can see the huge German influence in even Modern Day English with words like: hamster, poodle, Rottweiler, pretzel, noodle, seltzer, pumpernickel, frankfurter, lager, hamburger, wanderlust, spiel, poltergeist, rucksack, kaput, quartz, angst, and a lot more.
Now, the original English, the kind that developed right after the arrival of this new mix of language was known as Old English, and if you’ve ever tried to read Old English, you’ll know that it’s impossible unless you are an active scholar in the subject.
The most famous existing text written in Old English is Beowulf, and you can see for yourself here that it’s undecipherable to the average English speaker today.
From there, the language developed into what is known as Middle English.
William the Conqueror, well, conquered in 1066 and suddenly, French and Latin started to heavily influence English due to the Norman king and there was also Scandinavian influence from the Vikings.
During this time, French was the language of the elite, even within England – considered the language of the learned and this is why we see a large French influence on today’s English.
Modern English
So how did we get to Modern English?
There was something that has quite a hilarious name called the Great Vowel Shift, which sounds like either a band name or some sort of festival, but basically there was a period for about 300 years until 1700 when a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language took place, where the pronunciation of the long vowels, and some consonant sounds from Middle English, changed.
Part of the reason was population migration, following the Black Plague so a clash of dialects created new sounds, as well as the French loan words we’ve talked about and a period of “correction” when the language of England’s aristocracy switched to English from French.
This is the version of English that got spread around to the colonies, dropped off in America along with a hefty dose of Puritanism and tea taxes, and actually resembles the language you know today.
You can see the shift start to happen around Shakespeare’s time, which was an early version of Modern English – Shakespeare isn’t indecipherable like Beowulf, but does pose a challenge for many students today because while it uses many words we do recognize and you can make out what he’s saying, it’s not as easy to understand for Modern day English speakers, despite the fact that he is writing in English!
Today, English is a global language, taking over the former roles in Europe of French and Latin as a common language – it is used in many places to conduct business and diplomacy – it’s even considered the “language of the skies” and is the globally agreed upon pilot language.
In fact, it is the language most often taken as a foreign or second language.
This is in major part of the spread of the language due to the British empire, as well as more modern reinforcements like the World Wide Web and programming languages coming out of English speaking countries as well as British and American exports of film, television, and music around the world.
It’s spoken as the official language in countries like the United States, Canada, Bermuda, Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Barbados, the Bahamas, Gibraltar, Ireland, the UK obviously, Malta, Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Sudan, Mauritius, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Australia, the Cook Islands, Fiji, New Zealand, Samoa and many more, as well as being used as an “administrative language” in countries like Bahrain, Egypt, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates.
And because it’s a bit mixed up after all of the migration and borrowing of words, it can actually be considered a hard language to learn, due to the inconsistent pronunciation and spelling rules and hybrid nature of it all.
Phonetically, it doesn’t always follow what you would expect.
That being said, it lacks other things that can make other languages more finicky, like having no gendered words, ie, whether a noun is considered “male” or “female” – which then changes other words you use surrounding it.
Interestingly, you can sometimes tell where an English word derives from based on how concrete and descriptive it is – the more concrete and descriptive, the higher a chance it came from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more abstract the word is, the more it contains Latin and French influences.
So, there you have it.
English is from the English, but it’s also not, depending on what time period we’re talking about and what form of English we’re talking about – its long and fascinating history starts from outside of the country, but what then develops within it is a language now spoken by an estimated 1.46 billion people.