The Origin of the English Language
A lot of native English speakers decide to learn Spanish as a second language because they say that Spanish is rather similar to English. But when you look at the two branches of language families that they come from: English is a Germanic language, and Spanish is a Romance language.
How can this be?
The truth is, this hardly begins to uncover the series of exchanges and manipulations of the origin of the English language.
The German aspect of English is actually from the Germanic tribes — the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes — that inhabited the Great Britain area in the 5th century. They carried several dialects of the Old Germanic language, and as they merged into one, Old English was formed.
In the 9th century, Vikings began to raid Great Britain. The raids eventually led to mass migration as well. As the two communities intertwined, many words were exchanged and borrowed. This led to a lot of early Scandinavian words in English vocabulary, like “sky” and “egg.” One of the greatest influences was the dropping of “grammatical gender” and a drastic decrease in inflections. This was to make communication between the Vikings and the British…
