Old English period (500-1100 AD)

1623: Shakespeare’s First Folio is published

1666: The Great Fire of London. End of The Great Plague

1702: Publication of the first daily, English-language newspaper, The Daily Courant, in London

1755: Samuel Johnson publishes his dictionary

1770: Cook discovers Australia

1776: Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence

1782: Washington defeats Cornwallis at Yorktown. Britain abandons the American colonies

1788: British penal colony established in Australia

1803: Act of Union unites Britain and Ireland

1828: Noah Webster publishes his dictionary

1851: Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick

1922: British Broadcasting Corporation founded

1928: The Oxford English Dictionary was published

1939-1945: The Second World War, after which Britain's Empire started to disintegrate, contributing to the country's economic and political decline.

1969: The first oilfield was discovered on the U.K.'s continental shelf of the North Sea, which led to the first production in 1975.

1996: The Stone of Scone, Scotland's coronation stone of ancient kings, was returned from London to Edinburgh Castle, 700 years after it was stolen by Edward I.

                                                     Conclusions

    English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate.

    The original Old English language was then influenced by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree.

    Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance languages (Latin based languages). This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility, resulting in an enormous and varied vocabulary.

    The history of the English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes who invaded Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. But most of the Celtic speakers were pushed west and north by the invaders - mainly into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Angles came from Englaland and their language was called Englisc - from which the words England and English are derived.

                                                    Bibliography

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