The English language has evolved over many hundreds of years from three main linguistic sources; primarily Germanic, but with deep roots in the Celtic and Italic languages.
The earliest language known to be spoken in the British Isles was Celtic, which evolved along somewhat different linguistic paths to the Celtic spoken on the continent in Gaul, the Pyrenees and the Alps, into Insular Celtic. Continental Celtic began to die out from the time of the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, whereas the Insular Celtic of the British Isles continued to thrive unmolested for a further century before the infirm emperor Claudius finally brought south-east Britain under the aegis of Rome. Unlike its continental counterpart, however, Insular Celtic continued to be used in the highlands and islands of Britain, despite the presence of the Italic-speaking occupation army.
Insular Celtic has itself developed into several distinct tongues; Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, also the now extinct languages, Cornish and Manx, which was spoken on the Isle of Man until it was formally taken over by the British Crown in 1765, since which time Manx was slowly eroded over the years until it finally ceased to be used in the late 1960's. Before its demise in the eighteenth century, the Cornish language was exported to the Brittany region of north-western France sometime during the Dark Ages of the seventh or eighth century, where it is still spoken today in the form of Breton.
To learn a bit more Cornish, see STATIO DEVENTIASTENO (Nanstallon, Cornwall).
The Roman military was comprised of two distinct arms, the highly-trained legions of citizen troops, and the less well-trained auxilia, who were recruited or drafted from among peregrine (i.e. non-Latin) tribes. It was these foreign auxiliary troops that were used by the Romans to garrison the conquered territories, being posted in outpost forts at the limits of empire, often far from their native lands. Thus we have a colony of Sarmatian horsemen at Bremetenacum (Ribchester, Lancashire), and a company of Armenian-speaking boatmen from the Tigris valley at Arbeia (South-Shields, Tyne & Wear). These foreign-speaking troops were posted far apart in groups of around five-hundred, and the effect of their native tongue on the local, Old British language can only have been minimal.
Latin would be by far the most common tongue spoken in Britain during this time in history. Communication between the garrison posts whether in Britain or Egypt would be in Latin, and this language was encouraged and adopted by almost all of the conquered tribes within the far-flung empire. For almost five-hundred years, Latin would be the preferred tongue amongst the British nobility, in the southern and eastern - lowland - parts of Britain at least.
Following the official withdrawal of the Roman military in the early fifth century, and for a period of over five-hundred years, the British Isles were to suffer many invading forces upon its shores. First of all, and even during the Roman occupation, the north of England was threatened by raiding parties of vicious Picts and Scots, Wales and the lands around the Bristol Channel were frequently raided by bands of Irish privateers, and the south-east of England was threatened by the Saxons of northern France.
After a while these were joined by many different Germanic peoples, first from the continent in the shape of the Angles and Jutes, and then from Scandinavia by the Danes and the Norwegians, popularly known as the Vikings. During this time many English counties were first named, for instance, East Anglia was of course inhabited by the Angles, and Sussex and Essex are contractions of their original 'South-Saxon' and 'East-Saxon'.
The arrival in the British Isles of Norman interlopers was to have two main effects on the development of Angle-ish as the language of lowland Britain had come to be known; first of all they brought yet another language - essentially Old French - to add further spice to the insular linguistic cooking-pot, and secondly but more importantly, they spread the resultant homogenised language, Old English, throughout the lowland region of Britain.
The Normans were to occupy almost all of the lands south of Scotland and east of Wales, essentially, England. Cornwall however, at Britain's south-west tip, and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea each had its own language, evolved from Celtic and both in common use up until relatively recent times. All of these places are either mountainous or otherwise isolated regions and to the invading Norman Noblemen apparently not worth the effort.
Modern English has been described as a 'borrowed language', in that it has actively adopted words from many foreign sources, including words from; Celtic: cat, cavalry, furor, druid; Scots Gaelic: loch, crag, cairn, glen, clan, whiskey; Irish: constable, dungeon, bog, shamrock; Sioux Indian: wigwam, teepee, pow-wow; Eskimo: kayak, blubber, igloo; Italian: piano, allegro, solo, largo and loads of other musical terms; Latin: opera, ego, confer, curriculum, gratis, lex and a bunch other legal jargon; Norwegian: fjord; Welsh: cwm; German: blitz, berg, panzer; even American: zit, jazz; and interestingly, only three words from ancient Egyptian: pyramid, pharoah and desert, a compound of two Egyptian words des-ret meaning 'the red land'. There are of course, many others too numerous to mention within the limited scope of this web-page.
The main reference works used during the construction of this page were: WORDS - An Illustrated History of Western Languages, edited by Victor Stephenson, also the Collins English Dictionary (among many others).
