THE STUDY OF
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
(21PBACT104)
STUDY MATERIAL
I SEMESTER
CORE COURSE
MA ENGLISH
History of English Language Page 1
,History of English Language Page 2
, Section A
Introduction
This section unfolds the gradual development of English from a parent language through
Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. Many historical events such as Norman
Conquest, Renaissance, invasions from different places to England …etc. have been made several
changes in English language. English has borrowed lots of words from many languages. Let us
trace out the evolution of English language from the historical developments of English society.
Language Families
Modern Linguistic research has claimed that language can be grouped in families and many
languages can be traced to a common ancestor in remote times. A large group of such related
languages constitute what we call a ‘language family’. The process of divergent development of a
language gives rise to further languages, with common features of the parent language added to
new features, resulting in a whole complex family of languages with various branches, some more
closely and some distantly related to one another.
There are about 250- 300 distinctive language families in the world. The following are the
major language families of the world:
Indo- European
Sino – Tibetan
Niger – Congo
Afro – Asiatic
Austronesian
Dravidian
Austro Asiatic
Altaic
Uralic
Caucasian
History of English Language Page 3
, Indo – European Family of Language
The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely
spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as
Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from Latin. Indo-European languages
are believed to derive from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no
longer spoken.
It is highly probable that the earliest speakers of this language originally lived around
Ukraine and neighbouring regions in the Caucasus and Southern Russia, then spread to most of the
rest of Europe and later down into India. The earliest possible end of Proto-Indo-European
linguistic unity is believed to be around 3400 BCE. It is generally believed that it was spoken by
nomadic tribes which wandered in the regions around the Black Sea. They are said to have gone
as far as the steppes of Siberia.
Since the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language did not develop a writing system,
we have no physical evidence of it. The science of linguistics has been trying to reconstruct the
Proto-Indo-European language using several methods and, although an accurate reconstruction of
it seems impossible, we have today a general picture of what Proto-Indo-European speakers had in
common, both linguistically and culturally. In addition to the use of comparative methods, there
are studies based on the comparison of myths, laws, and social institutions.
The Indo-European Family
It has been proved by the scholars that it is the parental languages of almost languages of
Europe and some of the languages of Asia. It was split up into various sections and moved in
different directions across the continent of Euro- Asia. Each section got isolated from the others.
Each developed its parent language along its own lines. Gradually this resulted in the development
of different dialects of the original language. It is believed that as a result of this two - fold process
the original Indo- European was split up into eight distinct groups of dialects by 2000 B. C. or a
little later. They were Eastern (Sanskrit), American, Greek, Albanian, Italic, Balto – Slavonic,
Primitive Germanic and Celtic. Each of these in course of time sub divided and the process
continued. According to G L Brook, the dispersal of the speakers of Indo European took place
somewhere between 3000 and 2000 B. C. New research published today in the journal Nature, led
by University of Adelaide ancient DNA researchers and the Harvard Medical School, shows that
at least some of the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe were likely the result of a massive
migration from Eastern Russia.
History of English Language Page 4
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