英语到底从哪里来？

When we talk about English, we often think of it as a single language.

But why the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other?

Or with writing of Chaucer, how any of them related to the strange of words in Beowulf?

The answer is that like most of languages, English has evolved through generation of speakers undergoing major changes overtime.

By undoing these changes, we can trace the language from the present day back to the ancient roots.

While modern English shares many similar words with Latin derived Romance languages like French and Spanish, most of those words were not originally a part of it, instead, they started come into the language with the Norman invasion of England in 1066.

When the French speaking Normans conquer England and became its ruling class, they brought their speech with them adding a massive amount of French and Latin vocabulary to the English language previously spoken there. Today, we called that language Old English. This is the language of Beowulf.

It probably doesn't look very familiar but it might be more recognizable if you know some German.

That's because Old English belongs to the Germanic language family.

First brought to the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.