5 maps that explain the English Language Parte I

English, like more than 400 other languages, is part of the Indo-European language family, sharing common roots not just with German and French but with Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian. This beautiful chart by Minna Sundberg, a Finnish-Swedish comic artist, shows some of English's closest cousins, like French and German, but also it's more distant relationships with language originally spoken far from the British Isles such as Farsi and Greek.

 

Saying that English is Indo-European, though, doesn't really narrow it down much. This map shows where Indo-European languages are spoken in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia today, and makes it easier to see what languages don't share a common root with English: Finnish and Hungarian among them.

 

Here's how the English language got started: after Roman troops withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century, three Germanic peoples - the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes - moved in and established kingdoms. They brought with them the Anglo-Saxon language, which combined with some Celtic and Latin words to create Old English. Old English was first spoken in the 5th century, and it looks incomprehensible to today's English-speakers. To give you and the idea of just how different it was, the language the Angles brought with them had three genders (masculine, feminine, and neutral). Still, though the gender of nouns has fallen away in English, 4,500 Anglo-Saxon words survive today. They make up only about 1 percent of the comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, but nearly all of the most commonly used words that are the backbone of English. They include nouns like 'day' and 'year', body parts such as 'chest', 'arm' and 'heart', and some of the most basic verbs: 'eat', 'kiss', 'love', 'think', 'become'. FDR's sentence 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself' uses only words of Anglo-Saxon origin.

 

The next source of English was Old Norse. Vikings from present-day Denmark, some led by the wonderfully named Ivar the Boneless, raided the eastern coastline of the British Isles in the 9th century. They eventually gained control of about half of the island. Their language was probably understandable by speakers of English. But Old Norsewords were absorbed into English: legal terms such as 'law' and 'murder' and the pronouns 'they', 'them', and 'their' are of Norse origin. 'Arm' is Anglo-Saxon, but 'leg' is Old Norse; 'wife' is Anglo-Saxon, but 'husband' is Old Norse.

 

The real transformation of English - which started the process of turning it into the language we speak today - came with the arrival of William the Conqueror from Normandy, in today's France. The French that William and his nobles spoke eventually developed into a separate dialect, Anglo-Norman. Anglo-Norman became the language of the medieval elite. It contributed around 10,000 words, many still used today. In some cases, Norman words ousted the Old English words. But in others, they lived side by side as synonyms. Norman words can often sound more refined: 'sweat' is Anglo-Saxon, but 'perspire' is Norman. Military terms (battle, navy, march, enemy), govermental terms (parliament, noble), legal terms (judge, justice, plaintiff, jury), and church terms (miracle, sermon, virgin, saint) were almost all Norman in origin. The combination of Anglo-Norman and Old English led to Middle English, the language of Chaucer.