You teach English, but how well do you know its history? 

What does English have in common with French, Russian, and Sanskrit? They all evolved from the same parent language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European (PIE). There isn't a written record of PIE, but we know it existed because of cognates that can be found in each of these languages.

Cognates are words in different languages that come from the same root. Unlike loan words, cognates do not move from one language to another through contact. The word form in a cognate set is native to several languages. Typically, these are basic vocabulary words that early humans used for the most essential communication. Compare English one, two, and three with French un, deux, and trois, or English mother and father with Spanish madre and padre.

Fun Fact
Not all languages in the Indo-European region belong to the PIE family. One example, Basque, is a language isolate—which means it isn’t related to any known language. 

Old English

English comes from the Proto-Germanic branch of the PIE tree, which means that it evolved from the same PIE descendant that produced German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. Old English developed out of the combined dialects of Germanic tribes called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who invaded Britain in the 5th century. These tribes originally used a runic alphabet called the futhorc. The Anglo-Saxons adopted the Latin alphabet after Roman missionaries arrived to spread Christianity to England. 

Old English was an inflected language, like Latin. It didn’t use many function words like pronouns, conjunctions, or prepositions. Instead, it used suffixes that communicated a word’s role in a sentence. Most of these suffixes have fallen out of the language, but we still inflect the plural (-s), the past tense (-ed), and the possessive (’s), along with a few other grammatical categories. One theory about the fate of our inflectional suffixes is that we lost them to simplify communication with Scandinavian settlers, who invaded England in the 9th century. The settlers spoke Old Norse, which paired familiar Germanic roots with an entirely different set of inflections. By the Middle English period, English speakers had replaced most inflections with function words. Word order had also become more important for clarity. 

What’s with all the Latin words?

Even though English is a Germanic language, it also shows influence from the Romance languages—the PIE branches that evolved from Latin. English has always borrowed religious and scholarly words from Latin, but another source of Romance roots in our vocabulary is the Norman Conquest of 1066, which established a French-speaking ruling class in England for more than 100 years.

During this time, English was rarely written down, and when it was, it was done by French scribes, who changed the largely phonetic English spellings to align with French conventions. We can thank these scribes for letter combinations like qu and th for the /kw/ and /θ/ sounds.

During the Renaissance, English scholars also respelled words that had Greek or Latin roots, resulting in even more spelling eccentricities—ph for /f/, for example. 17th-century British colonialism also caused English to absorb some non-PIE vocabulary, especially from indigenous North American, Oceanic, and African languages. 

Standard spelling & grammar

Spelling only began to standardize during the 15th and 16th centuries in response to mass printing and rising literacy rates. In the 18th century, English scholars set out to standardize grammar, too—often inventing rules that they hoped would make English more like Latin. We still teach and follow many of these rules, but others, like those that dictate proper use of the subjunctive mood and the modal verb shall, are now almost obsolete.

Languages often lose features when they’re no longer effective or necessary for common understanding.

Today’s linguists usually take a descriptive approach, documenting how people use the language rather than promoting a standard. Many colloquial constructions in modern English actually follow complex rules and contain subtle distinctions of meaning. And because English has become the most widely spoken second language in the world, groups of speakers from all over bring their own innovations to the table. 

Related Ellii lesson

The English Language

Sources

• The English Language: A Linguistic History by Laurel J. Brinton and Leslie K. Arnovick (Oxford University Press, 2006)
• The Riddles in Old English Runes 
• The History of English 
• A Brief History of the English Language 
• People of England