How far can we trace English back?
Really far.
Not just through Middle English and Old English, but y back thousands of years.
Allow me to introduce you to English's oldest ancestor.
Welcome to another RobWords.
This is the English language family tree, and as we trace it back, we essentially go further back in time.
English sprung out of the West Germanic languages - the same as modern Dutch and German.
But the West Germanic languages share a common ancestor with all the other Germanic languages, the Scandinavian languages and Gothic, which is extinct no.
An ancestor that gets called the "proto-Germanic" language: a language that was theoretically spoken by a single group of people who would eventually go on to become the Swedes, the Germans, the Dutch, the English and more.
But can we go even further back than that?
