language timeline

Language Timeline

The English language is a vast flea market of words, handed down, borrowed or created over more than 2000 years. And it is still expanding, changing and trading. Our language is not purely English at all – it is a ragbag of diverse words that have come to our island from all around the world. Words enter the language in all sorts of ways: with invaders, migrants, tradesmen; in stories, artworks, technologies and scientific concepts; with those who hold power, and those who try to overthrow the powerful.

View the chart below to get an overview of some of the many chapters in the history of the English language.
Celts 500BC-43BC

Early

inhabitants of these islands

The Celts are the earliest inhabitants of the British Isles to leave a mark on our language.

Celtic words

In fact, very few Celtic words have lived on in the English language. But many of our place names have Celtic origins, such as London, Dover and Kent, & the rivers Thames & Wye.

Romans 43BC-c.450AD

Romans invade and rule British Isles for over 400 years
Only around 200 Latin loanwords are inherited from the Romans – although by the 6th century the Church will have brought many more.
Roman words

Many of the words passed on from this era are those coined by Roman merchants and soldiers. These include win (wine), candel (candle), belt (belt) and weall (wall).

Anglo Saxons 449AD

Germanic tribes – Angles, Saxons and Jutes – begin to arrive

Anglo Saxon dialects form the basis of the language we now call Old English. About 400 Anglo Saxon texts survive from this era, including many beautiful poems – these tell tales of wild battles and heroic journeys.

Anglo Saxon

words

Approximately one third of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary survives into modern English, including many of our most basic, everyday words: earth, house, food, sing, night and sleep. By the 7th century Latin speakers refer to this country as Anglia – the land of the Angles – a name that will later develop into England.

St Augustine 597 AD

Christian missionaries arrive from the Continent
Christian missionaries, led by St. Augustine, move through the land, converting the Anglo-Saxons from their Pagan beliefs to a Catholic Christian faith. Throughout Europe, the language of the Church is Latin, and the missionaries inject hundreds of new Latin words into the English language. English is spoken differently in different counties, but four main dialects exist and resemble the English we know today. These dialects are Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish.
Latin words

Many of the new words derived from Latin refer to religion, such as altar, mass, school, and monk, but others are more domestic and mundane such as fork, spade, spider, tower, and rose.

Vikings 789AD

The year 789 sees the first Danish invasion of Britain
For a hundred years the Vikings control most of Eastern England, before being pushed back into the North East of the country by King Alfred the Great. They remain in power in the North East until the late 900s, in an area then known as Danelaw. During this time King Alfred uses the English language to develop a sense of national identity amongst the English.
Norse words

These raiders and settlers bring almost 2000 new words into the English vocabulary. Words derived from Norse include anger, awkward, cake, die, egg, freckle, muggy, reindeer, silver, skirt and smile. Many Northern English dialect words still bear traces of Scandinavian languages, as do many place names such as Whitby and Grimsby.

Normans 1066

The Normans invade
The Normans transform England, both culturally and linguistically. For over 300 years French is the language spoken by the most powerful people – royalty, aristocrats and high-powered officials – some of whom can’t speak English at all. French is used in political documents, in administration, and in literature. Latin is still the language of the church and of scholars, but most of the general population speak English in their everday lives.
French words

Thousands of French words become embedded in the English vocabulary, most of which are words of power, such as crown, castle, court, parliament, army, mansion, gown, beauty, banquet, art, poet, romance, chess, colour, duke, servant, peasant, traitor and governor.

100 Years War 1337-1450s

100 Years War fought between England and France
Following the 100 Years War, many people regard French as the language of the enemy. The status of English rises. The universities of Oxford & Cambridge are established. Literacy increases but books are still copied by hand and are therefore extremely expensive.

New Latin

words

Many thousands of Latin words come into the language, most of which are connected to religion, medicine, law or literature. These words include scripture, collect, immortal, history, library, solar, recipe and genius.

Renaissance 1476-1650

A time of great cultural and intellectual development
In 1476, Caxton introduces the printing press to England. He prints all kinds of texts: mythic tales, popular stories, poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces & grammars. In the following 150 years around 20,000 books are printed. Books become cheaper and are therefore increasingly popular. Literacy rates rise. Printers have to make a choice about which words, grammar and spellings to use. The choices they make help to set and spread a standard language. They base their decisions on the dialects of the South East – the most socially and economically influencial region. But these rules are not set in stone, and people continue to speak in different accents and dialects, and to write with different spellings. Over the next 200 years wonderful discoveries and innovations are made in the fields of art, theatre and science. There is a fresh interest amongst scholars in classical languages, while intrepid explorers and opportunistic traders travel to the New World.
New words

With these fresh findings come new words from across the globe, including atmosphere, explain, enthusiasm, skeleton and utopian (from Latin); bizarre, chocolate, explore, moustache and vogue (from French); carnival, macaroni and violin (from Italian) harem, jar, magazine and sherbet from Arabic); and coffee, yoghurt and kiosk (from Turkish); tomato, potato and tobacco (from Spanish)

1700s

An age of dictionaries, grammars and rules and regulations
Human knowledge continues to stretch into new areas, with discoveries in the fields of medicine, astrology, botany & engineering. Many scholars believe that the English language is chaotic, and in desperate need of some firm rules. Books teaching ‘correct’ grammar, pronunciation & spelling are increasingly popular. Samuel Johnson publishes his famous dictionary in 1755.
Derided words

Words hated by Johnson, and omited from his dictionary, include bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby, and touchy.

Industrial Revolution 1760-1800s

Transformation of the western world
In an age of inventions and contraptions, of science & industry, of expanding cities & smog-gurgling factories the language must swell to accommodate new ideas.
New words

Newly coined words include biology, taxonomy, caffeine, cityscape, centigrade, watt, bacterium, chromosome and claustrophobia. In the world of burgeoning capitalism, money can suddenly slump, inflate, boom and cause depressions. Victorian writers pen over 60,000 novels.

1900s – Present Day

English of today
A century of world wars, technological transformation, and globalisation. The language continues to grow, expanding to incorporate new jargons, slangs, technologies, toys, foods and gadgets.
Familiar words

It is in this century that we get doodlebugs, gasmasks, gobstoppers, mini skirts and mods and rockers; we enjoy dim sum, cappuccino, chicken tikka masala and pizzerias; we talk of chavs, mingers and weirdos; and we are addicted to tellies, websites, cybercafes and compact discs.

Dr Paul Meyer wonders how meaning changes with time

How and why is our language evolving so rapidly?

Says linguist Betty Birner:

“Language is always changing, evolving, and adapting to the needs of its users. This isn’t a bad thing; if English hadn’t changed since, say, 1950, we wouldn’t have words to refer to modems, fax machines, or cable TV. As long as the needs of language users continue to change, so will the language. The change is so slow that from year to year we hardly notice it (except to grumble every so often about the ‘poor English’ being used by the younger generation!). But reading Shakespeare’s writings from the sixteenth century can be difficult. If you go back a couple more centuries, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are very tough sledding, and if you went back another 500 years to try to read Beowulf, it would be like reading a different language.

Why does language change?

Language changes for several reasons. First, it changes because the needs of its speakers change. New technologies, new products, and new experiences require new words to refer to them clearly and efficiently. Consider the fax machine: Originally it was called a facsimile machine, because it allowed one person to send another a copy, or facsimile, of a document. As the machines became more common, people began using the shorter form fax to refer to both the machine and the document; from there, it was just a short step to using the word fax as a verb (as in I’ll fax this over to Sylvia).

Another reason for change is that no two people have had exactly the same language experience. We all know a slightly different set of words and constructions, depending on our age, job, education level, region of the country, and so on. We pick up new words and phrases from all the different people we talk with, and these combine to make something new and unlike any other person’s particular way of speaking. At the same time, various groups in society use language as a way of marking their group identity – showing who is and isn’t a member of the group. Many of the changes that occur in language begin with teens and young adults: As young people interact with others their own age, their language grows to include words, phrases, and constructions that are different from those of the older generation. Some have a short life span (heard groovy lately?), but others stick around to affect the language as a whole.

We get new words from many different places. We borrow them from other languages (sushi, chutzpah), we create them by shortening longer words (gym from gymnasium) or by combining words (brunch from breakfast and lunch), and we make them out of proper names (Levis, fahrenheit). Sometimes we even create a new word by being wrong about the analysis of an existing word. That’s how the word pea was created: Four hundred years ago, the word pease was used to refer to either a single pea or a bunch of them. But over time, people assumed that pease was a plural form, for which pea must be the singular, and a new word – pea – was born. (The same thing would happen if people began to think of the word cheese as referring to more than one chee.)

Word order also changes, though this process is much slower. Old English word order was much more ‘free’ than that of Modern English, and even comparing the Early Modern English of the King James Bible with today’s English shows differences in word order. For example, the King James Bible translates Matthew 6:28 as “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not.” In a more recent translation, the last phrase is translated as “they do not toil”. English no longer places not after the verb in a sentence.

Finally, the sounds of a language change over time, too. About 500 years ago English began to undergo a major change in the way its vowels were pronounced. Before that, geese would have rhymed with today’s pronunciation of face, while mice would have rhymed with today’s peace. But then a ‘Great Vowel Shift’ began to occur, during which the ay sound (as in pay) changed to ee (as in fee) in all the words containing it, while the ee sound changed to i (as in pie). In all, seven different vowel sounds were affected. If you’ve ever wondered why most other European languages spell the sound ay with an e (as in fiancé) and the sound ee with an i (as in aria), it’s because those languages didn’t undergo the Great Vowel Shift. Only English did.

Wasn’t English more elegant in Shakespeare’s day?

People tend to think that older forms of language are more elegant, logical, or correct than modern forms, but it’s just not true. The fact that language is always changing doesn’t mean it’s getting worse; it’s just becoming different.

In Old English, a small winged creature with feathers was known as a brid. Over time, the pronunciation changed to bird. Although it’s not hard to imagine children in the 1400’s being scolded for ‘slurring’ brid into bird, it’s clear that bird won out. Nobody today would suggest that bird is an incorrect word or a sloppy pronunciation.

The speech patterns of young people tend to grate on the ears of adults because they’re unfamiliar. Also, new words and phrases are used in spoken or informal language sooner than in formal, written language, so it’s true that the phrases you hear teenagers using may not yet be appropriate for business letters. But that doesn’t mean they’re worse – just newer. For years English teachers and newspaper editors argued that the word hopefully shouldn’t be used to mean ‘I hope’, as in Hopefully it won’t rain today, even though people frequently used it that way in informal speech. (And, of course nobody complained about other ‘sentence adverbs’ such as frankly and actually.) Now the battle against hopefully is all but lost, and it appears at the beginnings of sentences even in formal documents.

If you listen carefully, you can hear language change in progress. For example, anymore used to occur only in negative sentences: I don’t eat pizza anymore. But now, in many areas of the country, it’s being used in positive sentences: I’ve been eating a lot of pizza anymore. In this use, anymore means something like ‘lately’. If that sounds odd to you now, keep listening; you may be hearing it in your neighborhood before long.

Why can’t people just use correct English?

By ‘correct English’, people usually mean Standard English. Most languages have a standard form; it’s the form of the language used in government, education, and other formal contexts. But Standard English is just one dialect of English.

What’s important to realize is that there’s no such thing as a ‘sloppy’ or ‘lazy’ dialect. Every dialect of every language has rules – not ‘schoolroom’ rules like ‘don’t split your infinitives’, but rather the sorts of rules that tell us that the cat slept is a sentence of English, but slept cat the isn’t. These rules tell us what language is like rather than what it should be like.

Different dialects have different rules. For example:

(l) I didn’t eat any dinner.

(2) I didn’t eat no dinner.

Sentence (l) follows the rules of Standard English; sentence (2) follows a set of rules present in several other dialects. But neither is sloppier than the other; they just differ in the rule for making a negative sentence. In (l), dinner is marked as negative with any; in (2), it’s marked as negative with no. The rules are different, but neither is more logical or elegant than the other. In fact, Old English regularly used ‘double negatives’, parallel to what we see in (2), and many modern languages, including Italian and Spanish, either allow or require more than one negative word in a sentence. Sentences like (2) only sound ‘bad’ if you didn’t happen to grow up speaking a dialect that uses them.

You may have been taught to avoid ‘split infinitives’, as in (3):

(3) I was asked to thoroughly water the garden.

This is said to be ‘ungrammatical’ because thoroughly splits’ the infinitive to water. Why are split infinitives so bad? Here’s why: Seventeenth-century grammarians believed Latin was the ideal language, so they thought English should be as much like Latin as possible. In Latin, an infinitive like to water is a single word; it’s impossible to split it up. So today, 300 years later, we’re still being taught that sentences like (3) are wrong, all because someone in the 1600’s thought English should be more like Latin.

Here’s one last example. Over the past few decades, three new ways of reporting speech have appeared:

(4) So Karen goes, “Wow – I wish I’d been there!”

(5) So Karen is like, “Wow – I wish I’d been there!”

(6) So Karen is all, “Wow – I wish I’d been there!”

In (4), goes means pretty much the same thing as said; it’s used for reporting Karen’s actual words. In (5), is like means the speaker is telling us more or less what Karen said. If Karen had used different words for the same basic idea, (5) would be appropriate, but (4) would not. Finally, is all in (6) is a fairly new construction. In most of the areas where it’s used, it means something similar to is like, but with extra emotion. If Karen had simply been reporting the time, it would be okay to say She’s like, “It’s five o’clock”, but odd to say She’s all, “It’s five o’clock” – unless there was something exciting about it being five o’clock.

A lazy way of talking? Not at all; the younger generation has made a useful three-way distinction where we previously only had the word said. Language will never stop changing; it will continue to respond to the needs of the people who use it. So the next time you hear a new phrase that grates on your ears, remember that, like everything else in nature, the English language is a work in progress.

For further information

Aitcheson, lean. 1991. Language Change: Progress or Decay? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bryson, Bill. 1991. Mother Tongue: The English Language. New York: Penguin Books.

Some new words from the COED (Revised Eleventh Edition)

Below are some of the new words to enter the most recently published dictionary of current English: the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Revised Eleventh Edition).

abdominoplasty

n. Medicine a surgical operation involving the removal of excess flesh from the abdomen.

aerobicized or aerobicised

adj. (of a person’s body) toned by aerobic exercise: aerobicized Hollywood women.

agroterrorism

n. terrorist acts intended to disrupt or damage a country’s agriculture.

– derivatives

agroterrorist n.

bahookie

n. Scottish a person’s buttocks.

– origin 1930s: prob. a blend of behind and hough + -ie.

best

– phrases

best of breed

· any item or product considered to be the best of its kind.

blowback

n.

2. chiefly US the unintended adverse results of a political action or situation.

celebutante

n. a celebrity who is well known in fashionable society.

– origin 1930s: blend of celebrity and debutante.

crunk

n. a type of hip-hop or rap music characterized by repeated shouted catchphrases and elements typical of electronic dance music, such as prominent bass.

adj. US, chiefly black slang (of a person) very excited or full of energy.

– origin 1990s: perh. an alt. past part. of crank¹ or a blend of crazy and drunk.

elephant

– phrases

the elephant in the room a major problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but avoided as a subject for discussion because it is more comfortable to do so.

emulsion

n.

1.

· a fine dispersion of one liquid or puréed food substance in another: ravioli with pea and ginger emulsion.

hardscape

n. chiefly US the man-made features used in landscape architecture, e.g. paths or walls, as contrasted with vegetation.

– derivatives

hardscaping n.

hoody (also hoodie)

n.

· informal a person, especially a youth, wearing a hooded top.

– origin 1960s: of unknown origin.

mentee

n. a person who is advised, trained, or counselled by a mentor.

mesotherapy

n. (in cosmetic surgery) a procedure in which multiple tiny injections of pharmaceuticals, vitamins, etc. are delivered into the mesodermal layer of tissue under the skin, to promote the loss of fat or cellulite.

mzee

n. (in East Africa) an older person; an elder.

– origin Kiswahili, ‘ancestor, parent, old person’.

obesogenic

adj. tending to cause obesity.

plank

n.

3. Brit. informal a stupid person.

ponzu

n. (in Japanese cookery) a sauce or dip made with soy sauce and citrus juice.

– origin Japanese, from pon ‘smack, pop’ + zu, from su ‘vinegar’.

radge Scottish informal

n. a wild, crazy, or violent person.

adj. wild, crazy, or violent.

– origin 1920s: appar. an alt. of rage.

rendition

n.

3. (also extraordinary rendition) (especially in the US) the practice of sending a foreign criminal or terrorist suspect covertly to be interrogated in a country with less rigorous regulations for the humane treatment of prisoners.

retronym

n. a new term created from an existing word in order to distinguish the original referent of the existing word from a later one that is the product of progress or technological development (e.g. acoustic guitar for guitar).

– origin 1980s: blend of retro- and -onym.

riffage

n. informal guitar riffs, especially in rock music.

shoulder-surfing

n. the practice of spying on the user of a cash-dispensing machine or other electronic device in order to obtain their personal identification number, password, etc.

– derivatives

shoulder-surfer n.

SIPP

n. (in the UK) a self-invested personal pension, a pension plan that enables the holder to choose and manage the investments made.

therapize or therapise

v. subject to psychological therapy: you don’t need to therapize or fix each other.

tri-band

adj. (of a mobile phone) having three frequencies, enabling it to be used in different regions (typically Europe and the US).

twonk

n. Brit. informal a stupid or foolish person.

– origin 1980s: perh. a blend of twit¹ or twat and plonker.

upskill

v. [often as noun upskilling] teach (an employee) additional skills.

· (of an employee) learn additional skills.

wedge issue

n. US a very divisive political issue, regarded as a basis for drawing voters away from an opposing party whose supporters have diverging opinions on it.

Yogalates (also trademark Yogilates)

n. a fitness routine that combines Pilates exercises with the postures and breathing techniques of yoga.

– origin 1990s: blend of yoga and Pilates.

zombie

n.

3. a computer controlled by a hacker without the owner’s knowledge, which is made to send large quantities of data to a website, making it inaccessible to other users.

English acquires its millionth word

English has now acquired its millionth word, according to a website monitoring the extraordinary emergence of new English throughout the world, including slang, word-marriages with other languages and the thousands of new terms spawned by the internet.

“The Million Word milestone brings to notice the coming of age of English as the first truly global language”, said Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor.

Whether one accepts Mr Payack’s claim depends on how one defines the word “word”.

As of 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained 301,100 main entries. Adding in combination words, derivatives and phrases brings the OED total to 616,500 word-forms.

The Global Language Monitor, however, accepts as a word any coinage that has gained sufficiently wide usage: this includes hybrid words in Chinglish (Chinese English), Hinglish (Hindi English), Spanglish (Spanish English), Hollywords (terms created by the film industry), computer jargon and words forged by the internet.

Appropriately enough, the 1,000,000th word accepted as genuine yesterday was “Web 2.0” which was defined as “the next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you”.

Three other terms narrowly lost out to “Web 2.0” in the race the million mark: “Jai Ho!” a Hinglish expression signifying a major accomplishment; “slumdog” (made popular by the film Slumdog Millionaire), meaning a child slum dweller, and “n00b”, a mixture of letters and zeros which is a mocking term for a newcomer in the online gamer community.