Language is first and foremost a communication device. Human beings also communicate in forms of mannerism like facial expressions and hand gestures, but our most important communication device is language.Communication with language is called linguistic communication, while communication with facial expressions and such is called non-linguistic communication. The only ones who can use linguistic communication are humans. All other organisms, such as monkeys, dogs, dolphins, etc., cannot use this, instead they use non-linguistic communication. They have their own sounds but they do not serve as actual communication. Language is something only humans have. It consists of words and combination of words that form sentences.
Language consists of tons of signs, which is a combination of a form and a meaning. So you can have the form down which people associate with the meaning from a higher to a lower place, the form and meaning combined then creates a sign. There are an infinite amount of signs and, of course, we do not have the capability to remember all the signs (we can only remember between 10,000 and 20,000 signs on average), which is why we combine the signs. This is called syntax. When combining signs we can create more complex meanings and sentences, There is no limit as to how many sentences a person can create. Our individual language is infinitive so to speak.
If you go with the belief that writing depends on language to be actual writing then writing started about 5,300 years ago in Mesopotamia. The first language to have ever been written down is Sumerian. Although writing started 5,300 years ago, a lot of languages only started to be written down in 19th and 20th century. It is a safe assumption to say that language already existed way before humans started writing it down, but there is no evidence since it was impossible to record voices way back in the day and we do not have written evidence. The only tiny piece of evidence there is, is an Australian myth that has been handed down to generations through oral tradition. The myth states that a legendary man visited all the mountains, islands, and lakes and gave them a name. It was said that it was possible for the man to walk across to the islands (Palm Island, Hinchinbrook Island, etc.), while now that is impossible because of the masses of water. Scientists believe it probably had been possible to do what the myth says about 8,000 – 10,000 of years ago. This proves that language is much older than writing.
Nowadays, there are about 6,900 spoken throughout the world. This is an enormous amount so it has been divided up into 90 language families. A language family is a group of languages that has the same origin. Two language families that will be important in this report are Germanic and Roman. The two most known Germanic languages are Dutch and German, but a lot of people often forget that English is in fact a Germanic language as well and not a Roman language. Examples of Roman languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Roman language has Latin as their language ancestor. Both Germanic and Roman have the same origin, though. They both originated from Indo-European. Most languages in Europe originated from Indo-European. The language was spoken around 3,000 BC.
It is even believed by some that all languages have something called a common origin. This means that all languages originate back to one single language. This language is referred to as proto-language which was spoken in a certain time in the past. It is believed that everything started with this proto-language, but eventually dialects started to form and these dialects turned into whole different languages of their own. This mostly happened because of geographical distance between groups of humans. Within these new languages again dialects started form, which again turned into a new set of languages. Through the ages this cycle kept repeating itself and now we have ended up with around 6,900 languages around the world.
So in conclusion, language is a phenomenon only humans possess and use a device for communication. It dates back thousands and thousands of years ago, but there’s only one piece of evidence that language existed before it was written down 5,300 years ago. Nowadays almost all languages are being written down next to being spoken. Today, there are 6,900 languages which are divided into one 90 language families which include Germanic and Roman. All languages are believed to have originated from one single languages called the proto-language.
Development of the English language
We must keep in mind that the terms Old English, Middle English and Modern English are modern terms. In those days the Britons would say that they just spoke English as there is not a major turning point in the language. The changes in the language were made gradually over the years.
Old English
The English spoken in the period between the invasion of the Angles and the Saxons (Adventus Saxonum) and the Norman Conquest of 1066 AD is generally referred to as Old English.
The Anglo-Saxon invasion
Britain used to be inhabited in the north by Scots and Picts and in the south by various groups which were under Roman rule. In the early 50th century AD, the Roman Empire withdrawn from Britain as Gaul, now known as France, was being taken over by Germanic speaking tribes. The Britons, still celtic speaking but Romanised in their behaviour as well as in their attitude, had now to take care of their own.
As the Romans were not able to protect the Britons anymore, the Britons found themselves in a weak position. This weak position was taken advantage of by the Germanic tribes as they started attacking the British Isles. Those Germanic tribes have probably come from the area’s now known as Denmark and the north-east of Germany. The people were called the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The Germanic raiders were not the only enemy the Britons had to face, in the north they were facing hostile Scots and Picts. To have some sort of protection, the Britons engaged the Germanic mercenaries.
The Germanic nations succeeded quickly in defeating the Picts and the Scots. Not much later they allied with the Picts and started to conquer territory that is know known as England. This conquest took more than a century. The Anglo-Saxons considered themselves as warriors and their pride were the areas they conquered.
What is remarkable of the Anglo-Saxon culture is that there was an abundance of literature. Many works were on Christian themes as in the late sixth and seventh century the Anglo-Saxon territories reformed to Christianity. In the late seventh and eighth century two acknowledged authors existed: Aldhelm and the Venerable Bede. Aldhelms most important work was De Virginate (On Virginity). He made this work twice, once in prose and once in verse. Bede wrote biblical commentaries, textbooks on orthography, nature and time and he wrote Historia Ecclesiastica.
Many authors in the seventh- and eighth-century wrote in Latin, the Anglo-Saxon authors as well. However the Anglo-Saxons created a relatively large amount of literature in vernacular language at a time when not much was written down in other European Languages. The poem Beowulf is from this period.
A literary project arose which contained the focus of activity switch from Latin to English. The Old English written work reflected the way the pronounced the words very closely.
The Viking Invasion
Late eighth century Vikings raids in England started. They came from what is now known as Denmark and Norway. They spoke Old Norse. This language was very similar to Old English. In 865-9 the Vikings conquered some Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in East Anglia. However, the Anglo Saxons fought back and eventually the Vikings retreated and settled in Northumbria and East Anglia. Their new appropriated land was called the Danelaw. In the Danelaw, Old English and Old Norse merged together what would shape the main characters of future English.
The language started changing. In the Danelaw, the Vikings and the Britons strove to communicate with each other. Their languages had a lot of similarities, for example the grammatical inflexions, the ending of words. For example the words ‘worm’ or ‘serpent’. When used as object in sentences the word in Old Norse was ‘orminn’ and in English is was ‘wrymm’. As the two languages molded together, those inflexions eventually disappeared.
The Norman invasion
The literary transformation lasted for more than 200 years, until it came to a sudden stop due to the Norman Conquest of 1066 and its aftermath. The Anglo-Saxon territories were overrun by the Norman French, descendants from the Vikings. They were lead by William the Conqueror. Not only did the Normans appropriate the Anglo-Saxon lands, they massacred whole Northumbria areas. Those who fled ended up in the Scottish lowlands. Their language mixed with the native language and eventually became the basis of the lowland Scottish tongue.
The king of Scotland had peaceful relations with the Normans which granted him land. He was given english speaking servants, whose language had been strongly influenced by Norse. As this English which was influenced by the Norse and the local language mixed, ‘Inglis’, later know as ‘Scottis’ developed. Today the Scottish language is very similar to Old English. The pronunciation of Scottish and English developed in different directions, as Scottish has some words deduced from Old Norse and English has words deduced from Anglo-Saxon dialects.
In England, in the south, France had started a war against England which would last about 100 years. After those years, the political and the personal links between the two countries had vanished. The language spoken by higher classes and the government became Norman French. English became the speech of the peasants. The interaction between Old English, Old Norse and Norman French resulted in new pronunciations and grammar. A new language evolved, more suitable to write down.
Beowulf
In this passage from Beowulf the poet stays uncertain whether Grendel is a man or a monster. Human characteristics such as drĕamum bedǣled ‘deprived of joys’ are reminders from when he was disconnected from God. Nonetheless Grendel has monstrous strength as the door already bursts open by only a light touch and the fiery light shining from his eyes is certainly non-human.
Cδm þã tô recede
drĕamum bedǣled.
fỹr-benedum fæst,
On-brǣd þã bealo-hỹdig,
recedes mũþan.
on fãgne flôr
ēode yrre-môd,
ligge gelÃcost
Geseah hē in recede
swefan sibbe-gedriht
mago-rinca hēap.
Middle English
The period when Middle English was spoken is said to be between 1100-50 and 1450-1500. However, since language changes continuously, in their vocabulary, pronunciation and grammatical form, it’s impossible to decide the exact date on which the language switched from Old English to Middle English for example. Nonetheless, it is clear that writing from the mid-twelfth-century is plentiful changed from the Old English language to be able to call out a new period.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Anglo-Saxon language became nothing more than another written Middle English form: South-Western. The language had lost its special status and became nothing more than another part of a French-speaking realm. This development took about 200 years, and that’s why there are such a major differences between the texts written down in the tenth or eleventh century and the texts written down in the twelfth century. Scribes in the twelfth century wrote in whichever form of English they seemed fit. They represented in their writing language changes which only appeared occasionally as it is in the nature of languages to be changing continuously and therefore the written language had to change timid.
There are three features in which Middle English notably differs from Old English:
The system of inflexions was much simpler, specially for nouns and adjectives.
A main cause for this simplification, was because the people had the impulse to pronounce vowel-sounds in unstressed syllables of words as /ə/, the sound heard in unstressed, second syllable of the modern word ‘China’. Due to the unstressed inflexional endings of most words the tendency erased many distinctions between them. All Middle English dialects lost their ‘grammatical gender’, since they all had depended on the the inflexional distinctions of words.
The link of words in a sentence became more dependent on their preposition and word-order.
This change developed parallel to the distinction of inflexions. In Old English, the nominative (subject) was distinguished from the accusative (object)by inflexions. As those had disappeared in Middle English, only by the word-order it was able to identify the subject of a word from its object.
More variety in vocabulary.
As English is from origin a Germanic language, the Old English vocabulary had only a few words from other sources, such as Latin of the Church. In comparison, since the Norman Conquest, Middle English draws massively on French and Latin. But Middle English drew also upon the Scandinavian languages from the intruders who had in the late Anglo-Saxon period populated large areas of England.
Varieties of Middle English
Since in the Middle English period there was no standard written English, the linguistic diversity in written work was much greater than that of Old English texts. In Troilus Geoffrey Chaucer criticizes the ‘gret diversité / In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge’. Over a certain period of time, any language spoken by many people will indeed consist of a ‘gret diversité’. The usage of the diverse language styles depends on the place, time and individual. A fixed written language exists to mask these troublesome diversities and to make a generally accepted language, understandable for anybody. This absence leads in Middle English to ‘gret diversité in writyng of oure tonge’ as Chaucer states.
Written Middle English is mainly divided into two variation: the regional variation and the local variation. Spoken English has always been diverted this way and still is, but the written language was rarely seen in regional form.
Since there were many different forms of written regional languages, there have been made up several ways to classify them. The most simple way to distinguish them is by identifying the languages into ‘Southeron, Northeron, and Myddel speche’. This classification was formulated by John Trevisa in the fourteenth century. Presently there have been made further distinctions for Southern and Middle: South-Eastern, South-Western and West Midland and East Midland. Even now the variations in English can be categorized even further. By describing a regional dialect, one must look at the characteristics of its idiom, spelling, vocabulary, grammatical forms, etc. However, if those features are taken individually and mapped according to their existence in localizable texts, two facts emerge.
One of the individual features does not have a certain boundary in the land where people stop saying it.
When it is possible to roughly draw a boundary, it’s not the situation that outside that boundary no one speaks the dialect since many features of one dialect are also used in another dialect.
This means that the Middle English dialects can not be mapped precisely. Features are to be described as a broad characteristic of an area consisting different dialects.
Since there was no national written standard in Middle English, the same words could be spelled in different ways , even when the spoken language was the same. Nonetheless, the Middle English writing was not an uncontrolled activity. Some scribes followed rules determined by a local school or practice. But those school only existed for a certain period of time and those who studied there had to be prepared for the inconsistency in scribal spelling.
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is an accurate representation of Middle English. It contains Anglo-Nordic as well as some French features already. Even though Canterbury Tales is in Middle English, many people today can read the story without needing many translation. However, because of the spelling differences it may be difficult to understand without some translation assistance.
During Chaucer’s military career he was engulfed in the French culture which influenced his later works, for example The Canterbury Tales. Because of the interaction he had with a French poet, he fused Latin with Anglo-Norman and thus created words that are still recognizable today. However, in sound they may sound more familiar than when only the spelled word is seen.
Befell that in that season on a day
In Southwark at The Tabard as I lay
Ready to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with full devout couráge,
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry folk by áventure y-fall
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all
That toward Canterbury woulden ride.
Modern English
It may be said that the Middle English period has ended with a new established national written standard, just as it had begun with the disestablishment of the old one. The Great Vowel Shift which had begun in Middle English was by no means completed by 1500. Because of these complex changes, English now-a-days is pronounced very different compared to the Middle English period.
At the end of the Middle English Period, there had been a somewhat standard written English established. This start of a new standard written English is called the rise of Modern Standard English.
One very influential author in Modern English during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was William Shakespeare. He single handedly changed the English language to an significant extent. He took advantage of the freedom and flexibility of the language at that time. He played with the liberal grammatical rules in for example his nouns used as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and substantives. He also invented a lot of new words which are still in common use today.
By this time, the word order of sentences had gotten a subject-verb-object pattern and an auxiliary verb system has developed. However, to be was rather used as auxiliary than the more modern to have. For the past tense we not yet fixed rules and so clomb, climed, clew and clawed could all be used to express the past tense of climb. The plural noun endings were only ‘-s’ and ‘-en’ now and the verb ending ‘-en’ was replaced by ‘-eth’ and was yet in the process of being replaced by ‘-es’.
King Lear
This passage of Shakespeare’s King Lear gives an impression of the changes which had been made and of the changes which were yet to come:
Sir, I loue you more than words can weild ye matter,
Deerer than eye-sight, space, and libertie,
Beyond what can be valewed, rich or rare,
No lesse then life, with grace, health, beauty, honor:
As much as Childe ere lou’d, or Father found.
A loue that makes breath poore, and speech vnable,
Beyond all manner of so much I loue you.
Spelling differences in the words weild, valewed and honor are seen, but a more significant difference compared to today’s English are the transpositioned ‘u’ and ‘v’ and the ‘e’ in lesse and Childe. Both are in the process of transition.
As the language changed, the pronunciation of the educated remained fairly stable until the mid seventeenth century. The merging of phoneme was avoided, as was the progressive pronunciation system. However, when the Civil War started many developments were made in the speech for both the upper classes and the lower classes, especially in pronunciation. Words like tale:tail and sole:soul merged phonemic, initial sounds were combined (knot:not), a phonemic split into /ບ/ and /⋀/ in put/but and the re-allocation of vowels in cat/what emerged. Introduction of its. Only in the eighteenth century there was a new phase of stabilization. By this time it can be said that the Early Modern English period had come to an end, since then appreciable homogeneous character of the language was reached.
The spoken and written forms of Modern English were used separately, even though native speakers were the writers of the language and frequently used the same topics for both speaking and writing. But as the expertise in writing was not as common as now a days and the need to switch from the spoken language to the written language was not as frequent, both activities were far apart from each other. As the influence of schools increased, pronunciation and spelling were brought closer to each other and affecting each other in the process.
The twentieth century was a century full of wars, technology, transformation and globalization which all had its own impact on the way language developed. Words like camouflage, radar, barrage, brainwash were inhabited during the World Wars.
This century was also the time were people started questioning the underlying definition of words. Such as the underlying sexism in the words mankind, chairman and mailman, and the inherited racism in words as blackmail, blacklist and blackboard. However, there were also words which had gotten a positive re-branding such as gay, queen, bitch, nixxer.
Kite Runner
Kite Runner is a modern English novel, written by Khaled Hosseini. The novel was published in 2003, so it consists of very recent English. In this novel the Sunni Muslim Amir is struggling to find his place in the world because of trauma’s from his childhood.
Then I was screaming, and everything was color and sound, everything was alive and good. I was throwing my free arm around Hassan and we were hopping up and down, both of us laughing, both of us weeping. “You won, Amir agha! You won!â€
When we compare this to the work of Shakespeare above we can notice the big differences not only in sentence structure, but in spelling as well. Where the work of Shakespeare has a poetic flow to it, none of that is seen in this piece of text.
Nonetheless, in a few hundred years this text will be history as well and the language will have changed a lot again. By that time, many differences with this text will be found in both sentence structure and spelling.
English in social media
Since the evolving of social media the English language has changed faster than ever. The social media language, a giant generational gap, has appeared where the younger generation has more knowledge about the use of modern informal text than the older generation. The language used on social media or during mobile messaging can even be considered an entirely separate language. There might even be the possibility that in the future pictorial messaging will arise, where the use of words will be excessive. We will be back to where the cavemen started, communication through the use of images.