Anglo-Saxons Vikings and other Invaders of this island created a language that would go from being the lingo of the poor peasants to the most spoken and studied language in the world how the hell did that happen hey everyone welcome back to learn English with Benji today we're diving into an extremely interesting topic the history of my mother tongue English we'll discuss invasions borrowed words and even grammatical complexities that are no longer in the language today let's get into the video Our Story begins around 5 ad with the Anglo Saxon migrations to England there were three
main tribes the anglos the Saxons and the Judes which sailed across the North Sea from what is now Germany and Denmark Landing in Britain they brought their Germanic languages with them and they formed in that time period what we now know as Old English think of words like wife from the old English word we or King from the old English word cunning and house from the old English H while some of these words have survived Old English is basically unrecognizable to native English speakers if I was to hear a little bit of Old English I
would pretty much not understand anything this is due to an extreme difference in vocabulary and grammatical structures here's a quick example of how it used to sound [Music] F Kun Aus idon of sh shaving pretty crazy right now let's jump into the first major change for the English language the Vikings started invading in the 8th Century these Norse Warriors didn't just come to steal things and go back home they came to occupy to settle in the new land of course being that they already had their own language Old Norse this dramatically affected Old English we
borrowed a ton of words from Old Norse including everyday words like Sky egg knife they and even them pretty crazy right so we heard about the Anglo Saxons from Germany and the Vikings with their Old Norse so where do all of these Latin derived words come from fast forward to the year 1066 William the Conqueror and the Norman French army invaded England and suddenly French became the language of the ruling class the courts and the law this period known as Middle English is when a huge influx or a huge flow of French words came into
the English language think about words like justice court and government which all are of French origin this is why with some Concepts we have two different words for example we have the word cow which comes from Old English however the word beef comes from French this is because the people who spoke the old English were the peasants or slaves and they would take care of the cows while the ruling class the French speakers would eat the cow meat which they called beef over the next few centuries English regained its title as the main language in
England but during that time the language had changed so much it had gained so much vocabulary from other languages and it had even lost a majority of its extremely complex grammatical structures this Germanic and Old Norse and French mix is what has made English so unique however one more change was about to take place during those centuries and that was the Renaissance during this time period lots of Interest grew for Classical Languages like Latin and Greek this led to another wave of borrowing words giving us words like science democracy and even literature and as England
began colonizing many different parts of the world we also got even more borrowed words think of the Hindi words shampoo or Bungalow or arabic's algebra and coffee and many others and even today English continues to evolve and borrow new words from different languages due to the internet and globalization think of words like karaoke tsunami and even Emoji which are all from Japanese so as you can see the history of the English language is complex but extremely interesting even though English might be a language that you are required to learn be it for school or a
job or to do some traveling English is a unique language with an extremely fascinating history and I wanted to tell you this story because I think that falling in love with a language and its history is a great way to gain motivation to learn the language even more I hope that you found this video and concept interesting if you have any video suggestions please leave them in the comment section don't forget to like the video If you enjoyed it and subscribe to the channel if you're not already subscribed check down below in the description if
you would like to see the flashcards to learn some of the vocabulary that you might not have been familiar with it was wonderful seeing you again friend have a great week goodbye
