Old English

Old English, often called Anglo-Saxon, is the oldest known version of the English language. It was spoken in England and parts of southern and eastern Scotland during the Early Middle Ages. The language grew out of the dialects brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers around the middle of the 5th century, and the earliest surviving works in Old English date from the mid-7th century. The Norman Conquest in 1066 changed everything: for several hundred years afterward, the upper classes spoke Anglo-Norman, a type of French, instead of English. That year is considered the end of the Old English period, because the language then absorbed heavy influences from Anglo-Norman and Old Norse, eventually turning into what we call Middle English.

Old English came from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As these settlers gained control of England, their language pushed out the earlier languages of Roman Britain: Common Brittonic (a Celtic language) and Latin (brought by the Romans). There were four main dialects of Old English, each tied to a specific Anglo-Saxon kingdom: Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian, and West Saxon. West Saxon became the basis for the literary standard in the later Old English period, though Middle English and Modern English mainly developed from Mercian, and Scots from Northumbrian. In the east and north of England, speech was heavily shaped by Old Norse because of Scandinavian rule and settlement starting in the 9th century.

Old English belongs to the West Germanic language family, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it looks very different from Modern English or Modern Scots, and without study, speakers of those modern languages can’t understand it. Its grammar relied heavily on inflectional endings for nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs, and word order was much freer than it is today. The oldest Old English inscriptions were carved using a runic alphabet, but by the 7th century, a version of the Latin alphabet had taken over.

The word “English” comes from the name of the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Britain in the 5th century. By the 9th century, anyone speaking Old English—even those with Saxon or Jutish roots—could be called an Angle. The name “Angle” likely comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning narrowness or constriction, possibly referring to shallow coastal waters, or from a related word for a curve or hook, like a fishing hook. One theory is that the Angles got their name because they lived on a curved, fishhook-shaped promontory, or because they were fishermen.

Old English wasn’t a fixed language; it changed over 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement in the 5th century to the late 11th century, a while after the Norman Conquest. Scholar Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, calling it a period of full inflections and a synthetic language. Roughly 85% of Old English words are no longer used, but the ones that survive form the core of Modern English vocabulary.

As a West Germanic language, Old English grew out of North Sea Germanic dialects from the 5th century. It was spoken across most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that later became the Kingdom of England—that is, most of present-day England and part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for centuries belonged to the kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island kept using Celtic languages: Gaelic and possibly Pictish in most of Scotland, Medieval Cornish in Cornwall and parts of Devon, Cumbric (perhaps until the 12th century) in parts of Cumbria, and Welsh in Wales and possibly on the English side of the border. In areas settled by Scandinavians, Old Norse was spoken and Danish law applied.

Literacy in Old English took off after the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England in the late 7th century. The oldest surviving piece of Old English literature is Cædmon’s Hymn, composed between 658 and 680 but not written down until the early 8th century. There are a few runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the earliest coherent runic texts—like those on the Franks Casket—date to the early 8th century. The Old English Latin alphabet came into use in the 7th century.

When King Alfred the Great unified several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (outside the Danelaw) in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature settled around the West Saxon dialect (Early West Saxon). Alfred pushed for education in English alongside Latin and had many works translated into English; some, like Pope Gregory I’s treatise *Pastoral Care*, he may have translated himself. In Old English, poetry appeared before prose, but Alfred’s efforts mainly spurred the growth of prose. A later literary standard, from the late 10th century, emerged under Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester and was used by writers like the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham.