Evolution of English Languages in Britain Within Britain

Evolution of English

Languages in Britain • Within Britain, English is spoken by 95 per cent of the population (some 52 million). • The British Isles is also a home for many dialects, such as Glasgow, Liverpool, the West Midlands, Northern Ireland, Yorkshire, Newcastle and East London, and speech such as Afro-Carribean. • Welsh, Irish, Scottish-Gaelic and Scots are considered minority languages in Britain along with other languages from the Asian subcontinent, such as Urdu and Hindi.

English is a hybrid language Celts > Roman Anglo Saxons & Vikings Norman & French International Trade Celtic > Latin Old English Middle English Early Modern English Standardisation of written forms Introduction to Printing Press Colonialism Late Modern English Tech & Jargon / slang English Today

Celtic Language • The Celtic language group has been categorised as part of the Indo-European group of languages (Lovis, 2001) • Before the invasion of Anglo-saxons tribes, The inhabitants of Great Britain mostly spoke Latin and Celtic language (Owen, 2014). • Anglo-saxons invasion exterminated the celtic language and began the era of old English (Ibid, 2014)

Old English (Englisc) • Old English is the forerunner of the first English language, coinciding with the arrival of Anglo Saxons in the Land of Britannia in 450 AD. • Englisc is used until 1100 when the Norman took over the Britain. • Old English / Anglo-Saxon was first written with a version of the Runic alphabet and the use of runes is replaced by Roman alphabet in 7 th century (700 s AD). • The relic survived from Englisc era is the he long epic poem “Beowulf”.

Old English ortography Runes Roman alphabet

Old English (Englisc) • Some English words today are inherited from Englisc such water, earth, house, food, etc. • Many of English swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin such as piss, arse, shit, etc. • In terms of grammar, old English nouns had three genders (male, female and neuter) and could be inflected for up to five cases. • There were seven classes of “strong” verbs and three of “weak” verbs, and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person. • Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite articles had three genders and five case forms as a singular and four as a plural. • Word order was much freer than today, the sense being carried by the inflections (and only later by the use of propositions).

Old English (Englisc) • During the 6 th Century, for reasons which are still unclear, the Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster "sk“ (Anglo-frisian futhark) changed to "sh", so that skield became shield (Anglos-saxon futhark) • Then, around the 7 th Century, a vowel shift took place in Old English pronunciation in which vowels began to be pronouced more to the front of the mouth.

Old English (Vikings era) • The Vikings spoke Old Norse, the Germanic family of languages, which also includes English, German, and several other languages that are widely spoken today. Ex: berserk, ugly, muck, skull, knife, die, . . . • Accents and pronunciations in northern England even today are heavily influenced by Old Norse, to the extent that they are largely intelligible in Iceland.

Middle English • Middle English began when the Norman invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. • The anglo-saxon grammars and old-norse suffixes were completely died out. Many vowels developed into the common English unstressed “schwa”. • Word order became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order had gradually become the norm.

Celtic • The Norman conquest ressurrected the Celtic language by creating a linguistic hierarchy with Celtic languages that remained into two branches – Goidelic (Gaelic) and Brythonic (British). • Celtic languages were viewed as inferior, and words that have survived are usually words with geographical significance, and place names, ex: Thames river, Yare river, London, York.

Early Modern English • A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15 th, 16 th and 17 th Century. • Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale during this period, either intact (e. g. genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterion, squal or, apparatus, focus, tedium, lens, antenna, paralysis, nausea, etc)

Printing Press and Standardization • The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476. • With the advent of mass printing, the dialect and spelling of the East Midlands (and, more specifically, that of the national capital, London, where most publishing houses were located) became the de facto standard and, over time, spelling and grammar gradually became more and more fixed.

Late Modern English: Colonialism & • British colonialism had begun as early as the 16 th Century, but gathered speed and momentum between the 18 th and 20 th Century. • At the end of the 16 th Century, mother-tongue English speakers numbered just 5 -7 million, almost all of them in the British Isles; over the next 350 years, this increased almost 50 -fold, 80% of them living outside of Britain. • The rise of so-called “New Englishes” (modern variants or dialects of the language, such as Australian English, South African English, Caribbean English, South Asian English, etc) raised (pidgin and creole). • The practice of transporting cheap black labour from western Africa influenced English and created ‘Black English’

English Words Today (New words from borrowing and word-creation) • In the fields of higher learning like science and specific object from other culture, English has usually borrowed from other languages to name new concepts, mostly from Latin, Greek, and French. • Other than borrowing, new words are created by inheritance, creative imagination , blending, joining initial letters of a phrase, shortening, derivation, conversion, compounding, using names, and some rare echoic processes (You’ve learned this in morphology class)