English may be named after a fishhook-shaped coastline
The word English comes from Englisċ, meaning belonging to the Angles. Where the Angles got their name is murkier: perhaps from a Germanic root about narrowness or shallow coastal water, or from one meaning hook, because they lived on a fishhook-shaped promontory or simply went fishing.
Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, grew from dialects that Germanic settlers, traditionally the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, carried to Britain in the mid-5th century. As they came to dominate, their speech displaced the Celtic language of Roman Britain and the Latin of its conquerors. By the 9th century anyone speaking it could be called Englisċ, whether they claimed Angle, Saxon or Jutish ancestry. It was spoken across most of modern England and part of south-eastern Scotland, then held by the kingdom of Northumbria.
Modern speakers cannot read it without study. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs took many inflected endings, which left word order much freer, and perhaps 85 percent of its vocabulary has since disappeared, though the survivors form the core of today's language. Its nearest relatives were Old Frisian and Old Saxon. The earliest inscriptions used runes; the Franks Casket carries the oldest coherent runic texts, from the early 8th century, before a Latin-based alphabet took over.
Writing flourished after Christianisation in the late 7th century. The oldest surviving poem, Cædmon's Hymn, was composed between 658 and 680 but only written down decades later. There were four main dialects, Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian and West Saxon. When Alfred the Great united several kingdoms in the later 9th century, West Saxon became the standard for government and books; Alfred promoted education in English alongside Latin and apparently translated Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care himself. A refined Winchester standard emerged in the late 10th century, followed by writers such as Ælfric of Eynsham, and is seen as the classical form of the language.
Its reign lasted about 700 years; the linguist Albert Baugh places it between 450 and 1150. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English lost its place among the upper classes for several centuries, and the language drifted into Middle English, which ran until 1500.
Source: Old English
