The History of the English Language

english was basically a germanic language until ten 66, when these invaders from what is now france came and took over. The invasion also brought a new language, the he language of the norman french, across the channel into england to blend with english in the eleventh century. So that's why it's easy to kind of say that english is a thousand years old. It really might be a little bit longer if you are counting from old english. Course, there's a huge infusion of vocabulary that happened after the norman conquest. And then, of course, there was the development of what we refer to as middle english a few centuries later.