HISTOY ABOUT THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands in the 5th century[citation needed]. Up to that point, in Roman Britain the native population is assumed to have spoken the Celtic language Brythonic alongside the acrolectal influence of Latin—the Roman influence having been extant for 400 years

One of these incoming Germanic tribes was the Angles,who Bede wrote moved entirely to Britian from their previous home. The names 'England' (from Engla land "Land of the Angles") and English (Old English Englisc) are derived from the name of this tribe—but Saxons, Jutes and a range of Germanic peoples from the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland and Southern Sweden also moved to Britain in this era.

Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Great Britain but one of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate, and it is in this that the famous epic poem Beowulf is written.

Old English was soon transformed by two waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of the North Germanic language branch when Halfdan Ragnarsson and Ivar the Boneless started the conquering and colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries (see Danelaw). The second was by speakers of the Romance language Old Norman in the 11th centuary with the Norman conquest of England. Norman developed into Anglo-Norman, and then Anglo-French - and introduced a layer of words especially via the courts and government. As well as extending the lexicon with Scandanavian and Norman words these two events also simplified the grammar and transformed English into a borrowing language—more than normally open to accept new words from other languages.

The linguistic shifts in English following the Norman invasion,produced what is now referred to as Middle English, with Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales being the best known work.

Throughout all this period Latin in some form was the lingua franca of European intellectual life, first the Medieval Latin of the Christian Church, but later the humanist Renaissance Latin, and those that wrote or copied texts in Latin  commonly coined new terms from Latin to refer to things or concepts for which there was no existing native English word.

Modern English, that includes the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, is generally dated from about 1550, and as a result of the growth of the British Empire it was adopted in North America, India, Africa, Australia and many other regions—a trend extended with the emergence of the United States as a superpower in the mid-twentieth century.