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The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.
The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively traced back to the Paleolithic. However, archaeological and written records extend the history of language into ancient times and the Neolithic. The distribution of languages has changed substantially over time.
On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the second Wikipedia language edition to do so. On 21 September 2010, the French Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the third Wikipedia language edition to do so.
- Proto-English
- Old English
- Middle English
- Early Modern English
- Modern English
- Phonological Changes
- Grammatical Changes
- Examples
- See Also
- Further Reading
English has its roots in the languages of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe. During the Roman Empire, most of the Germanic-inhabited area (Germania) remained independent from Rome, although some southwestern parts were within the empire. Some Germanics served in the Roman military, and troops from Germanic tribes such as the Tungri, Batavi, M...
The Germanic settlers in the British Isles initially spoke a number of different dialects, which would develop into a language that came to be called Anglo-Saxon. It displaced the indigenous Brittonic Celtic (and the Latin of the former Roman rulers) in parts of the areas of Britain that later formed the Kingdom of England, while Celtic languages r...
Middle English is the form of English spoken roughly from the time of the Norman Conquestin 1066 until the end of the 15th century. For centuries after the Conquest, the Norman kings and high-ranking nobles in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles spoke Anglo-Norman, a variety of Old Norman, originating from a northern langue d'...
English underwent extensive sound changes during the 15th century, while its spelling conventions remained largely constant. Modern English is often dated from the Great Vowel Shift, which took place mainly during the 15th century. The language was further transformed by the spread of a standardized London-based dialect in government and administra...
The first authoritative and full-featured English dictionary, the Dictionary of the English Language, was published by Samuel Johnson in 1755. To a high degree, the dictionary standardized both English spelling and word usage. Meanwhile, grammar texts by Lowth, Murray, Priestly, and others attempted to prescribe standard usage even further. Early M...
Introduction
Over the last 1,200 years or so, English has undergone extensive changes in its vowel system, but many fewer changes to its consonants. In the Old English period, a number of umlaut processes affected vowels in complex ways, and unstressed vowels were gradually eroded, eventually leading to a loss of grammatical case and grammatical gender in the Early Middle English period. The most important umlaut process was *i-mutation (c. 500 CE), which led to pervasive alternations of all sorts, many o...
Vowel changes
The following table shows the principal developments in the stressed vowels, from Old English through Modern English (Cindicates any consonant): The following chart shows the primary developments of English vowels in the last 600 years, in more detail, since Late Middle English of Chaucer's time. The Great Vowel Shift can be seen in the dramatic developments from c.1400to 1600. Neither of the above tables covers the history of Middle English diphthongs, the changes before /r/, or various spec...
Examples
The vowel changes over time can be seen in the following example words, showing the changes in their form over the last 2,000 years:
The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to Latin, Greek, modern German and Icelandic. Old English distinguished among the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases, and for strongly declined adjectives and some pronouns also a separate instrumental case (which otherwise and later completely coincided with the d...
Beowulf
Beowulf is an Old English epic poem in alliterative verse. It is dated from the 8th to the early 11th centuries. These are the first 11 lines: Which, as translated by Francis Barton Gummere, reads:
Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan
This is the beginning of The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, a prose text in Old English dated to the late 9th century. The full text can be found at Wikisource.
Ayenbite of Inwyt
From Ayenbite of Inwyt("the prick of conscience"), a translation of a French confessional prose work into the Kentish dialect of Middle English, completed in 1340:
Bill Bryson (1990). The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way. William Morrow Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0380715435.David Crystal (2013). The Story of English in 100 Words. Picador. ISBN 978-1250024206.David Crystal (2015). Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist's Guide to Britain. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198729136.John McWhorter (2017). Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally). Picador. ISBN 978-1250143785.4 days ago · English language, a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to the Frisian, German, and Dutch languages. It originated in England and is the dominant language of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand.
- The English language is an Indo-European language in the West Germanic language group. Modern English is widely considered to be the lingua franca...
- As of 2020 there are 1.27 billion English speakers around the world. This makes it the most spoken language, ahead of Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billio...
- There has been much public and academic debate on whether African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a dialect of English or its own separate la...
- Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English...
- English is not the official language of the United States of America. The country does not have an official language on the federal level. Many sta...
Nearly all theorizing about the origins of language either ignores gesture, views it as an add-on or supposes that language began in gesture and was later replaced by speech. David McNeill challenges the popular 'gesture-first' theory that language first emerged in a gesture-only form and proposes a groundbreaking theory of the evolution of ...
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Apr 16, 2011 · Where And When Did Language Begin? April 16, 2011. The origin of spoken language has stumped linguistics dating as far back as the Twenty-sixth dynasty in Egypt and the first recorded language experiment conducted by a Pharaoh named Psammetichus I.
