English – A Language Created by Borrowing from Others

The history of the English language is also the history of the British Isles, as different invaders arrived for a thousand years between the decades before the birth of Christ and the last conquest of England in 1066. In the eleven hundred years between, the Romans brought Latin, tribes called the Angles, Jutes and Saxons carried with them their Germanic language, the Vikings used Old Norse from Scandinavia, and another Viking whose family had long settled in France, William the Conqueror, beat the last of the Saxon kings on the south coast of England in 1066 and introduced French as the language of the court, government and the law.