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Germanic tribes (Jutes, Saxons, Angels and Frisians) invaded Britain, bringing their dialects with them:
West Saxon
Kentish
Anglian.
It was an inflected language: for example, nouns indicated gender, case and number and the verbal system only had two tenses: Present or Preterite (past) -
William the Conqueror was crowned after the Battle of Hastings and this event made French the preferred language of the Upper classes. Lower classes still used English.
During this period, all the inflections were lost and English became a more analytic language. Nouns and adjectives no longer express case, number and gender (except for singular and plural in the case of nouns) -
The introduction of the printing press brought about the standardization of the language and fostered regulations in spelling and punctuation.
The noun system is the same as it is nowadays, strong verbs become weak and the word order pattern (S+V+O) is already in place. The consonant system is mostly the same as in Modern English, but the “Great Vowel Shift” occurred. -
The lexicon integrates words from three groups:
1- Germanico words
2- Latin, Greek and French
3- words that have been made up or borrowed due to the geographical expansion of English, as well as the social, cultural and scientific developments.
It had already lost many of its inflections and the Great Vowel Shift had already finished.
The early 20th Century saw the rise of RP. -
English becomes the most spoken language; more than Latin or French; and it gets spread geographically and functionally The international status of English is due to:
1- The expansion of British colonial power
2- The establishment of the US as the leading economic and military power English as a global lingua franca is spoken by native and non-native speakers around the world and it dominates the media communication, international travel and transport and electronic communication among others