The English language changed enormously during the Middle English period, in vocabulary, in pronunciation, and in grammar. While Old English is a heavily inflected language ( synthetic), the use of grammatical endings diminished in Middle English ( analytic). Grammar distinctions were lost as many noun and adjective endings were levelled to -e. The older plural noun marker -en (retained in a few cases such as children and oxen) largely gave way to -s, and grammatical gender was discarded. Definite article þe appears around 1200, later spelled as the, first appearing in East and North England as a substitute for Old English se and seo, nominative forms of "that." [26] Table 19 Enumerated population classified by usual residence and sex" (PDF). Webcitation.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on 15 September 2009 . Retrieved 21 August 2017.

Toby F. Martin, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England, Boydell and Brewer Press (2015), pp. 174–178 Despite this, after the early 1850s, the English-born slowly fell from being a majority of the colonial population. In the 1851 census, 50.5% of the total population were born in England, this proportion fell to 36.5% (1861) and 24.3% by 1881. [143] New Zealand's foundational culture was English, given the strong representation in the mid and late-nineteenth century with the English being the largest in migration inflows. [144]Alexander, Inigo (30 June 2019). "Now 90% of England agrees: being English is not about colour". The Observer. Archived from the original on 29 October 2021 . Retrieved 29 October 2021.

The vowel changes over time can be seen in the following example words, showing the changes in their form over the last 2,000 years: However, Alfred's successors subsequently won military victories against the Danes, incorporating much of the Danelaw into the nascent kingdom of England. Danish invasions continued into the 11th century, and there were both English and Danish kings in the period following the unification of England (for example, Æthelred II [a] (978–1013 and 1014–1016) was English but Cnut (1016–1035) was Danish). Beowulf is an Old English epic poem in alliterative verse. It is dated from the 8th to the early 11th centuries. These are the first 11 lines: After the Norman conquest in 1066, Old English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman (also known as Anglo-Norman French) as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English or Anglo-Saxon era, as during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English. The conquering Normans spoke a Romance langue d'oïl called Old Norman, which in Britain developed into Anglo-Norman. Many Norman and French loanwords entered the local language in this period, especially in vocabulary related to the church, the court system and the government. As Normans are descendants of Vikings who invaded France, Norman French was influenced by Old Norse, and many Norse loanwords in English came directly from French. Middle English was spoken to the late 15th century. The system of orthography that was established during the Middle English period is largely still in use today. Later changes in pronunciation, however, combined with the adoption of various foreign spellings, mean that the spelling of modern English words appears highly irregular.

From about 800 AD waves of Danish Viking assaults on the coastlines of the British Isles were gradually followed by a succession of Danish settlers in England. At first, the Vikings were very much considered a separate people from the English. This separation was enshrined when Alfred the Great signed the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum to establish the Danelaw, a division of England between English and Danish rule, with the Danes occupying northern and eastern England. [71] Geoffrey Chaucer ( / ˈ tʃ ɔː s ər/; c. 1340s – 25 October 1400) was an English poet and author. Widely seen as the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, he is best known for The Canterbury Tales.

Census 2011: Census in brief (PDF). Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. 2012. p.26. ISBN 978-0-621-41388-5. Archived (PDF) from the original on 13 May 2015. The number of people who described themselves as white in terms of population group and specified their first language as English in South Africa's 2011 Census was 1,603,575. The total white population with a first language specified was 4,461,409 and the total population was 51,770,560. An examination of the English ancestry of George Washington, setting forth the evidence to connect him with the Washingtons of Sulgrave and Brington. Boston, Printed for the New England historic genealogical society. 1889. Archived from the original on 3 February 2021 . Retrieved 18 December 2019– via Google Books. Schiffels, Stephan; Haak, Wolfgang; Paajanen, Pirita; Llamas, Bastien; Popescu, Elizabeth; Loe, Louise; Clarke, Rachel; Lyons, Alice; Mortimer, Richard; Sayer, Duncan; Tyler-Smith, Chris; Cooper, Alan; Durbin, Richard (19 January 2016). "Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history". Nature Communications. 7: 10408. Bibcode: 2016NatCo...710408S. doi: 10.1038/ncomms10408. PMC 4735688. PMID 26783965. Ross P. Byrne, Rui Martiniano, Lara M. Cassidy, Matthew Carrigan, Garrett Hellenthal, Orla Hardiman, Daniel G. Bradley, Russell McLaughlin: "Insular Celtic population structure and genomic footprints of migration" (2018)Understanding the 21st Century Catholic Community" (PDF). CAFOD, Ipsos MORI. November 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 September 2016 . Retrieved 31 October 2018. After the French king Louis XIV declared Protestantism illegal in 1685 in the Edict of Fontainebleau, an estimated 50,000 Protestant Huguenots fled to England. [85] Due to sustained and sometimes mass emigration of the Irish, current estimates indicate that around 6 million people in the UK have at least one grandparent born in the Republic of Ireland. [86] The languages spoken by the Germanic peoples who initially settled in Britain were part of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. They consisted of dialects from the Ingvaeonic grouping, spoken mainly around the North Sea coast, in regions that lie within modern Denmark, north-west Germany and the Netherlands. Due to specific similarities between early English and Old Frisian, an Anglo-Frisian grouping is also identified, although it does not represent a node in the family tree. [6]

Copus, Colin (2009). "English national parties in post-devolution UK". British Politics. 4 (3): 363–385. doi: 10.1057/bp.2009.12. S2CID 153712090. English nationalism 'threat to UK' ". BBC. 9 January 2000. Archived from the original on 14 August 2021. English – Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand". 20 September 2008. Archived from the original on 20 September 2008. The Elizabethan era is sometimes described as the golden age of English literature with writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson.

Gledhill, Ruth (15 February 2007). "Catholics set to pass Anglicans as leading UK church". The Times. London. Archived from the original on 18 September 2011 . Retrieved 18 February 2015. a b Martiniano, R., Caffell, A., Holst, M. et al. "Genomic signals of migration and continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons". Nat Commun'@ 7, 10326 (2016). doi: 10.1038/ncomms10326 "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 21 February 2022 . Retrieved 21 February 2022. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title ( link) CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link) Bowler, Peter J. (2001). Reconciling science and religion: the debate in early-twentieth-century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.194. . English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North ( Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West ( German, Dutch [and Flemish], Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure. Curry, Andrew (August 2019). "The first Europeans weren't who you might think". National Geographic. Archived from the original on 19 March 2021.