The History of the English Language by Laura Howard

This is a formal and educated article is about the history of English language. It can be for children who want to know about how English was developing throughout the years, and also to any person who is interested on that.  The purpose is to show how English was influenced by many cultures and how it stated to grow.

In this article by Laura Howard said that English language is the most famous language in the entire world. It is famous not only because it is the native language of many parts of the world, also because there are approximately 418 million people that learn English.

English language started around the year 449 AD. It is part of the Indo European language of the Anglo Frisian group. This group consist of all the Germanic languages, and are grouped this way because of relationship between them. There are several categories in which the history of English language is divided to understand how it came to be and continue developing. The categories are:

Old English period: The Old English was first spoken by Angles, Saxon and Jutes which were the ones that invaded Britain in the 5th Century AD. The most influential were the Anglo Saxons, since the word England came from them. The disadvantage of this period is that English did not have a lot of Vocabulary. For that reason many word of English come from the Celtic language, because the Saxon borrowed those word from that language. After that, Vikings invaded Britain and introduced word from their own.

Middle English period: To continue with this period, Normans were the ones that made an enormous change in the language. They started mixing English with formal French. But in the 14^th Century, English was the dominant language, of course with many influenced words of French language. The language of this period was used for many poems in those times. This period came to an end in the year 1204, when English came another time to be the dominant language.

Early modern English: This period is at the time of the Renaissance, in which Greeks and Latin words went to English language. Also it is the time in which idioms came to know thanks to famous writers as Shakespeare. There was a great change in the language pronunciation. Thanks to the new inventions, such as printing press, there was more equality in English.

English today: Industrialization and technology are the most important factor in the new English. Thanks to that there are more new, sophisticated, and formal words than before. They came to word more sophisticated and formal that there were before.

There are many influence bye different cultures in the process of the origin of this beautiful language. It has something of many languages, but that does not mean it is not an original language. Thanks to all those influential cultures, we can have this language as it is.

I totally agree with the author point of view in which she told that old English is not understanding for now day’s English speakers, since it is very different in words, pronunciation, grammar, etc. I think English will continue developing as technology continues growing.