These languages intermingled with one another throughout the centuries and became Middle English. Latin also gained influence as it became the language of education and the church. Sometimes the Anglo-French spoken by Normans would coincide with words learned from the Norse invaders, as the Normans were originally a proto-Norse group, this is seen through the word ‘Mug’, which was introduced to Northern dialects of Old English by Viking settlement and the Normans carried the word ‘Mug’ from the Norse they originally spoke into their French, which further reinforced its use in the English language, showing the close relation of European languages.

Furthermore, Old English was influenced by the Norse as many Norse invaders settled in northern parts of the isles from the 8th to 11th centuries, bringing their language with them. This is where a lot of English words gained their French influence as Anglo-French and Old English began to combine throughout the 12th to 15th centuries.

The Normans were a French-speaking group descended from Norse invaders in the North of France, and they introduced their language as the language of the elite, law, and administration. In 1066, the Normans invaded England under William The Conqueror. So how did this shift happen and English become the language spoken today? This opening line from Beowulf shows how different the spelling was between Old English and the modern English spoken today: “Hƿæt ƿē Gārde/na ingēar dagum þēod cyninga / þrym ge frunon” is completely unintelligible to modern English. The greatest surviving text of Old English known is the epic poem Beowulf, with over 3000 lines. This means that all of these parts of speech included changes in words, usually the endings, to indicate a variety of characteristics that could express tense, person, number, case, gender, or mood. It was also a highly inflected language, with its verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns being inflected. To make things even more complicated, old English was morphologically different from modern English, with three genders for nouns and adjectives instead of the modern natural gender. Old English spellings also didn’t use the letters k, q, or z. It had its own runic alphabet known as futhorc until the 8th century when they transitioned to the use of the Latin alphabet with the use of two modified letters (æ known as ash & ð known as eth) and two runic letters (þ known as thorn and ƿ known as wynn).įurthermore, the Latin alphabet at the time lacked the letters j and w, and v and u were not distinct from each other.

Old English was the language of the Anglo-Saxons present in England from the 5th century CE until it slowly declined after the 1066 invasion of William the Conqueror. If you put a modern speaker of English into a room with someone who spoke Old English, they would be completely unable to have a conversation as the languages are very different. Before Middle English was around, there was Old English. With a little bit of work, this language, known as Shakespearean English or Middle English, is highly intelligible with modern English. When people think of “Old” English, they typically think of Shakespeare and speeches laced with words like thou, thee & thy.

Middle english alphabet