History of English: When Angles Met Saxons
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011Previously, on History of English:
Last time, we covered some basic introductory material, but now it’s time to dive into our subject, as the kids say, for realz. So let’s go back to the first time English was spoken and… umm… well, hrm.
Turns out that figuring out just when a language got its start is not as easy as you might at first think. Most people don’t roll out of bed one day and say, “Y’know, today seems like a good day to create a new language. Let’s get on that, then.”1 In fact, sometimes it can be pretty difficult to tell when one language ends and another begins, due in part to some of that murkiness with dialects that we discussed last time. So first, we need to talk a little bit about where new languages come from.2
There are two main ways that new languages emerge: language contact and language change. Language contact is when speakers of two different languages come together, usually for an extended period of time, and their languages sort of mix. This can happen in a number of different ways, on a number of different levels, but for now just note that sometimes languages can mix together and change each other, or even have new little baby languages (this will be important later).
Language change can be a little more complicated. One thing that seems to be a constant in human experience is that languages do change over time and distance. There are a number of theories as to why this is, and it happens at various rates in different languages, but in the end it seems that we sort of have to take it as a given that languages will change. In once sense, this seems perfectly obvious: we always need new words for new things, right? But the changes can go far, far beyond that, into areas of grammar and structure. As Clive Upton famously commented, “The only language that doesn’t change at all is a dead one.”
(As an aside, even that can be a little misleading, since sometimes languages don’t really die; they just change into new ones. We call Latin a dead language for example, when really it just turned into French, Spanish, Romanian, and others. In a very real way, Italian is nothing but modern Latin. In fact, as we’ll soon see, the earliest forms of English are about as different from what we speak today as Latin is from Italian.)
Imagine it something like this: a tribe of hunter-gatherers moves into a new land. They all speak the same language, of course. There’s some argument about exactly which way to go, though, and where to settle. Since the tribe is getting pretty big, half of it decides to go one way, and the other half another. Over time, the two groups start speaking a little differently, then even more differently, enough that when they run into each other again a couple generations later, they can’t understand each other anymore. Then, later, those two groups branch out into more, and so on, and so on…
As you can imagine, though, since these groups started out speaking the same language, the new languages that emerge are pretty similar to each other in many ways. They share certain root words, and though they may not sound the same in each language, they probably will end up having similar sounds. They’ll probably put sentences together in similar, though different, ways.
Linguists say that languages like this are related, and group them into families. These language families are even put into a family tree, which is exactly what you’d expect: languages are grouped into subfamilies and branches of families, all going back to a single common ancestor.3
English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. That is, it’s a group of languages that can all trace their ancestry back to a single language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European, and which is the ancestor of the majority of the languages spoken in the area between Europe and India.4 Specifically, English is a member of the Germanic branch of that family, making it related to languages like German, Swedish, and Dutch. If you want to see where English falls on the ol’ family tree, Wikipedia has a great chart (I’d embed it here, but it’s huge!).
Okay, so remember what I said about language contact? Let’s get back to that.
English as a new language got started sometime around 450 AD5 when several groups who spoke various Germanic languages all decided to go and invade the British Isles. Why? I don’t know. Maybe invading things was all the rage back then. Maybe it’s what you and your friends did after a few too many rounds of mead. I mean, I personally think it would take more than a few pints to make “Hey, let’s go take over that cold rainy island!” sound like a good idea, but maybe that’s just me.
Prior to this, Britain had been inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages (Celtic is another branch of the Indo-European family, like Germanic) such as Welsh, Cornish, and Gaelic. The common wisdom is that the invaders pushed these Celtic languages aside, never to be heard from again in the history of English as a language (hint: we’ll be hearing about them again). As I said, there were several groups of Germanic invaders, most notably the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Each group spoke their own language (or more likely, several dialects of their own language), and though these languages were related, they weren’t the same.
Now that the new invaders had established themselves as the new guys in charge, they needed a way to talk to each other (but not those wussy Celts who let themselves get all conquered, presumably).6 So, like people do, they found ways to make it work. Their languages were already fairly close, as such things go, and what started to emerge were various hybrids. Over here, you got a little Anglic mixed with a dollop of Saxon. Over there, some Jute spiced up with Anglic, with maybe a little Frisian thrown in for color. These mixtures were all pretty similar, enough that you could communicate with your buddy who maybe grew up up north speaking a different mix. The mix that eventually emerged is what we call Anglo-Saxon, or Old English.
What’s important to note here–and this is really important, even down to today–is that there never was one original version of English from which all others descended. Instead, you have various different versions emerging as different groups settled and met in different places and at different times. Eventually, these all coalesced into a bunch of dialects similar enough to clump them together as a language, but it’s more of a fuzzy accumulation than a hard boundary. In England, you can still trace dialect lines today that correspond to the locations where different groups of invaders settled.
Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) language and see how, by modern standards, calling it “English” might be a bit of a stretch. Oh, and if we’re lucky, we might even get a visit from our friendly neighborhood Vikings, too! (Hint: the Vikings are not friendly.)
- Though sometimes people actually do do this, but that’s a slightly different subject. [↩]
- You see, when a Mommy Language and a Daddy Language love each other very much… [↩]
- In fact, linguists use this family metaphor extensively. There are mother and daughter languages. Languages are said to be genetically related, though this has nothing to do with the real human genetics of the people who speak them. [↩]
- In some older sources, you’ll see these referred to as the Aryan languages, but that term understandably fell out of favor following World War II. [↩]
- Or CE, if you prefer. I’ve always been accustomed to using BC/AD instead of BCE/CE, just as a matter of habit. I intend no religious preference by this. [↩]
- One can practically hear the high fives and fist bumps ringing across the centuries. [↩]




















Episode 0048: The Great Old Pumpkin