A common lament among those opposed to immigration is that “in many parts of England, you don’t hear English spoken any more”. But it has never been the case that English was the only language spoken on this island.
Old English, the earliest ancestor of the modern English language, was a relative newcomer to Britain. Its speakers, the Anglo-Saxons, came from different regions across what is now northern Germany to an island where many Celtic languages were spoken alongside Latin – a legacy of southern Britain’s time as a Roman colony. The Old English language was initially joined by other Germanic languages including Old Norse and Frisian.
The Norman Conquest brought speakers of the Romance language Norman French to Britain. They had such an impact on the English language that it shifted to a new stage of development known as Middle English.
