The Anglo-Saxon Settlement

It is never simple to identify when a certain language began, but in the

case of English, we can at least state that thinking of the English language as a
separate entity before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain makes little sense.
Anglo-Saxsons were Germanic tribes which came to Britain from the north-
western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries and settled
there. Unfortunately, there’s very little we can say about the linguistic situation of
that period. It is because we don’t have any written records. We only have written
records from 7th, 8th and 9th centuries, when old English writings begun to appear.
This is already the language that Alfred the Great referred to as ‘English’ in the
ninth century.
When Anglo-Saxons arrived, Celts have already lived in Britain. They had their
own, Celtic language, but surprisingly it didn’t have much influence on English.
Some linguists argue that it might have had a significant, but underlying influence
on the development of the grammatical system of English, but it is highly
hypothetical. The list of loanwords is very little and most of them are different
place names.
The Scandinavian Settlements
The next invaders on the list were the Norsemen. They settled in Britain in the
middle of the 9th century, particularly in northern and easter areas and already by
the 11th century, the entire England had a Danish kind named Canute.
North Germanic speech had a great influence on English. The list of loanword
include some common verbs like “take” and even some grammar words like
“they”. Both of these languages- North Germanic and Old English had the same
Germanic background so it’s not surprising that they had many common
characteristics. In fact, they were so similar that sometimes it’s difficult to exactly
determine the origins of a certain word or spelling. However the huge influence
of Norman language on Old English doesn’t appear in written language until
the Norman conquest
1066 and after 1066
The Norman conquest had a huge impact on every aspect of the English
language. During the middle English period the inflectional system of Old
English broke down and was replaced by relatively the same system that we
have today. There were tremendous changes in vocabulary as well. English
borrowed quite a huge amount of words from Latin and French for obvious
reasons. Old English, like modern German showed a nice tendency of finding
native equivalents for foreign words, while Middle English acquired the habit
of simply accommodating the foreign words into its vocabulary. That’s why
trilingualism was quite a common phenomenon during that period and
educated people were able to freely switch between Old English, Normand
French and sometimes even Latin if needed.

Standardization
During the later medieval and early modern periods, English went through the
process of standardization. Basically, what happened was that London continued to
evolve and develop and naturally, because of that the London dialect became the
dominant dialect. It was widely used in various formal contexts and by the more
educated members of society. As a result, local dialects begun to be stigmatized, so
If you spoke some other dialect and not London standard, you might have been
considered as an uneducated person.
In the same period a series of changes also occurred in English pronunciation.
Today we refer to that event as The Great Vowel Shift

Colonization and Globalization

From the early 17th century the influence of English language begun to spread
through the world. Which is not surprising, as it was an era of exploration,
colonization and overseas trade for The Great Britain. During this period, a large
amount of loanwords entered the English language, mainly through the languages
of other Imperial and trading countries, such as Portugal and Spain. Of course,
English words also entered other languages, mainly the languages of the British
colonies and eventually English has become a lingua franca, spoken and
understood in 67 different countries.