THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: A HISTORICAL AND LINGUISTIC REVIEW

The English language has evolved over fifteen centuries to become the most widely studied and spoken language in the world, and between 5th and 7th-century CE, British soil received the cluster of West Germanic dialects when tribes led by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes began their migration (Rahmani, 2025; Qizi, 2024). These dialects formed the linguistic basis of what evolved into Old English, which then underwent further development through historical changes, social transformations, and political movements. English belongs to the Indo-European language family, which links it alongside Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, as well as the Germanic linguistic groups (Nelson-Sathi et al., 2010). The English language evolved through historical phonological changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, before it reached the Anglo-Frisian dialects, providing linguistic evidence from Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law for the Germanic linguistic family (Millward & Hayes, 2012; Myachinskaya, 2019). The language evolved significantly due to extensive exposure to Latin during Christianization, Old Norse during the Viking settlement, and Norman French after the 1066 conquest, which transformed its vocabulary, as well as its syntax and morphological structure (Lutz, 2017; Timofeeva, 2018).