When did English become English?

Linguistics confronts the "species problem"

Trochilidae. – Kolibris (1904), Ernst Haeckel.

The most basic concepts in a science are often the hardest to define. Biologists, for example, speak of the “species problem,” which refers to the fact that no single definition of species seems to work for all living things.

Linguists have a similar problem with the definition of language. What separates one language from another? We have an intuitive sense that English and French are not the same language, but what exactly makes them different?

When we try to pin it down, we run into trouble.

One popular definition of language is based on mutual intelligibility. If speakers of two varieties — and I’ll use this neutral term throughout this article to avoid saying “languages” — can be understood by one another, these varieties are said to be mutually intelligible. On the mutual intelligibility definition, this means that the two varieties of speech are the same language.

But this runs into problems pretty quickly: one problem being the existence of a phenomenon called dialect continua.

A dialect continuum is a situation where you have speakers of different varieties spread out over a geographical area, for example, where Group A is only neighbours with Group B and Group B is only neighbours with Group C. Each group can communicate with its immediate neighbours, but not with the more distant group. So, by the mutual intelligibility criterion, A and B are the same language, as are B and C. But A is not the same language as C!

This is clearly a strange result. But it’s far from an uncommon situation. In fact, in the years before national education systems enforced a single standard within a given political area, these sorts of dialect continua existed all over the world. And they still do in many places.

The mutual intelligibility definition also runs up against our common sense ideas about which varieties are separate languages: for instance, speakers of Spanish and Portuguese can make themselves understood to each other with some effort, as I saw myself many times (in both directions) while traveling in Peru and Brazil.

Then there are cases like the Scandinavian languages, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, which are usually understood as separate languages despite some mutual intelligibility among the three.¹

And there are examples of the opposite case, where mutually unintelligible varieties are generally considered dialects of a single language, despite an utter lack of mutual intelligibility, as is the case with the “dialects” of Chinese, such as Mandarin and Cantonese.

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich offered, in jest, another criterion: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”²

This is one of those jokes which hides a kernel of truth, namely that languages are often defined culturally or politically, rather than according to strictly linguistic criteria.

This isn’t anything to lose sleep over, unless you’re a particularly neurotic linguist. Not having a universally applicable definition for “language” isn’t going to bring the field of linguistics to a halt any more than the species problem prevents biologists from doing biology.

But these multiple, and conflicting, definitions of language are relevant for answering today’s question: When did English become English?

As it turns out, there are multiple answers to this question. And to show you why, I’m going to tell you a story in which armies and navies (of a sort) feature prominently.

---

You're reading The Dead Language Society. I'm Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

Subscribe for a free issue every Wednesday, or upgrade to support my mission of bringing historical linguistics out of the ivory tower and receive two extra Saturday deep-dives per month.

If you upgrade, you’ll also be able to join our ongoing Beowulf Book Club. You can also catch up by watching our discussion of the first 1395 lines (part 1, part 2, part 3) right away.

---

Still waiting on the Proto-Germanic Duolingo course

A Wreck on the West Coast of Jutland at Sunset (1846–1847), Carl Frederik Sørensen

Around 2500 years ago, a language was spoken in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. We call it Proto-Germanic, because it is the common ancestor of the Germanic languages. This language was not written down, so we don’t know for sure exactly what it sounded like or precisely how it functioned.

In fact, its existence is entirely hypothetical.

But we can make very good guesses about what Proto-Germanic was like, using the comparative method: we look at the daughter languages and work out a plausible hypothesis about what the common ancestor looked like, given what we know about how language changes over time. This is the science of linguistic reconstruction, and it’s a fascinating and strangely satisfying process. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of how linguistic reconstruction works, you can read more about it here.

As a result of the work of many linguists over the past 200 years or so, we have a very solid reconstruction for Proto-Germanic. But it is just a reconstruction, or a hypothesis, of what the real language spoken on the shores of the Baltic 2500 years ago sounded like.

Undoubtedly, the real situation was slightly different. In fact, the real language that Proto-Germanic corresponded to was likely a dialect continuum rather than a single unified language. Did you see that coming?

For ease of explanation, I’ll call this real-life dialect continuum Proto-Germanic as well, even though — strictly speaking — that name should be reserved for the hypothetical reconstructed language.

Dialect continua only tend to stick around as continua when the speakers are living in close proximity. Distance may make the heart grow fonder, but enough distance for a long enough time starts to make communication more difficult, as the speech of each of the now-separated groups changes in different ways.

This began to happen to the speakers of Proto-Germanic around AD 300, at the beginning of what is now called the Migration Period. You may also know the period as the age of the “barbarian invasions,” the ones which contributed to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The “barbarians” in question — Goths, Vandals, and so on — were largely speakers of Proto-Germanic and its descendants, the emerging Germanic languages.

In fact, speakers of Proto-Germanic had been migrating even before the beginning of the Migration Period. Many of these early migrations and their consequences are recorded in Roman sources, such as Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars (published 58–49 BC).

But, despite these early migrations, the speech of these Germanic peoples — that is, speakers of Germanic varieties — seems to have maintained a kind of unity until around AD 300, which marks the end of anything we can identify as a single Proto-Germanic dialect continuum.³

Separate languages were starting to emerge: for instance, we can start to see a few differences from our reconstruction of Proto-Germanic in the earliest Germanic texts, that is, the runic inscriptions.

In the midst of all this migration, some of these Germanic-speaking peoples ended up dwelling along the coast of the North Sea, from Jutland in the east to Frisia in the west. There, the language of these North Sea Germanic speakers began to take on some shared characteristics.

For example, in sequences of nasal consonants (like m or n) followed by fricatives (sounds like f, s, or th), these languages dropped the nasal: Proto-Germanic *fimf (compare German fünf, with a nasal n) became *fīf in these languages. The English word five, with no nasal, is one of the descendants of these nasal-less forms.

Today we call the speech of these peoples North Sea Germanic or Ingvaeonic,⁴ although it too was likely a dialect continuum. From this dialect continuum come the medieval languages Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and, most importantly for us today, Old English.

But we’re still not at a point in our story where we can answer our question: When did English become English? This is because, at this point, what would become English was still part of a mix with what would become Old Frisian and what would become Old Saxon.

For English to emerge as a separate language, one further migration was needed.

---

You wouldn’t define a fish…

The North Sea at Blankenberge (1871), Louis Artan

Traditionally, there has been a clean date given to this last migration: AD 449. This, so Bede (AD c. 672–735) tells us, is the date of the adventus Saxonum, ‘the arrival of the Saxons’ into the island of Great Britain.⁵

The real story is likely a lot more complicated than a big group of people arriving all at once, but, whatever happened, one thing is clear: some speakers of a variety of North Sea Germanic migrated to Great Britain in the fifth century and brought their language with them.

Bede writes that, after the initial adventus Saxonum, more new arrivals followed, and these people came from three Germanic nations: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. In Bede’s own words:

Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, including those in the province of the West-Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East-Saxons, the South-Saxons, and the West-Saxons. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Angulus, and which is said, from that time, to have remained desert to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East-Angles, the Midland-Angles, the Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the Angles. (Ecclesiastical History of the English People 15, tr. Sellar)

So, traditionally at least, the Germanic-speaking settlers of (what would later be called) England came from three separate groups.

From what Bede tells us, each of these three groups settled in a different part of England. We know that these different parts of England had different dialects in Old English times, so, if Bede’s story is basically accurate, it’s tempting to imagine that the characteristics of these dialects descended from the different speech varieties of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. But we can’t say that for sure.

What we can say is that some speakers of North Sea Germanic varieties came to England, and some stayed behind. Of those who stayed behind, the most interesting for us are the Frisians. The varieties of Frisian spoken today are the closest relatives of the English language.⁶ So if we want to determine when English became English, we need to compare it with Frisian.

Bernard Mees

over at

The Age of Arthur

has considered this question recently. Here’s what he has to say:

Although English is closely related to Frisian, runic inscriptions appear to show that English and Frisian were already separate languages in the sixth century. The Frisian inscriptions retain features that the ancestors of English seem to have already lost before the migrations.

Check out his excellent article if you’d like to see the runic data in question, and check out his Substack as a whole for a fascinating look at the history of this priod.

For our purposes, however, we need to figure out how we want to interpret these data. Even if there were separate developments beginning in English and Frisian in the sixth century, was pre-Old English truly a separate language from pre-Old Frisian at that time?

If we use the criterion of mutual intelligibility, we almost certainly have to say no. The differences Mees points out as emerging in that early period between incipient Old English and incipient Old Frisian are very unlikely to have proved a barrier to communication.

In fact, we even have an anecdote from an 18th-century Frisian scholar, Matthias von Wicht, who asserted that “a Frisian, when in England and in an urgent Situation, can make himself understood to the English.”⁷ Even if you don’t believe von Wicht, and you probably shouldn’t, it’s plausible that forms of English and Frisian were mutually intelligible at least through the Old English period (roughly to AD 1100).

However, as we’ve already discussed, mutual intelligibility is not the only possible criterion for a definition of language. There are also social or political criteria. Without opening up the can of worms that is the development of a separate English identity, we can use the emergence of a separate written norm for English as another plausible date based on a cultural criterion.

The first instances of Old English written in the Latin alphabet likely date back to the early 7th century AD. In AD 597, the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms began with the Gregorian mission in Kent. Along with Christianity came the use of the Latin alphabet, and the emergence of a distinctive way of writing Old English using that alphabet. It’s no accident that our earliest attested written work in Old English in the Latin alphabet appeared in Kent, in the form of the Laws of Æþelberht (AD 616).

So you could make a good case that English becomes English — as opposed to whatever it was before — in the early 7th century. But, of course, that too is only one way of thinking about the question.

You could also make a case for a later date, such as when the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms became politically unified, either under Alfred the Great in AD 886 (the first King of the Anglo-Saxons) or Athelstan in AD 927 (the first King of the English).

In a way, though, the answer we give to this question is a lot less interesting than the process of thinking it through. What does it mean for something to be a separate language? As it turns out, these seemingly simple questions defy easy answers.

But this turns out to be true in many areas of life as well. Can you give a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be a fish? I certainly can’t, although I know it when I see it.⁸ As it turns out, the English language is the same way.

1. The specifics of this mutual intelligibility are a bit complex because Scandinavia is a dialect continuum. For example, speakers of Swedish varieties who live closer to Denmark are more able to comprehend Danish than those who live more distantly. Mutual intelligibility among Scandinavian languages is also asymmetrical: for example, Norwegians tend to comprehend Swedish better than Swedes comprehend Norwegian. Source: Delsing, Lars-Olof and Katarina Lundin Åkesson (2005). Håller språket ihop Norden? En forskningsrapport om ungdomars förståelse av danska, svenska och norska.

2. Weinreich attributed this quotation to an anonymous Bronx high school teacher attending one of his lectures. Actually, the quotation was originally given in Yiddish:

אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot.

3. The later stage of the Proto-Germanic dialect continuum is often called the Common Germanic period, as we know that the differences between the emerging Germanic varieties had already begun at this time. Despite this, however, there still seems to have been mutual intelligiblity among these varieties, as is seen from the fact that certain sound changes seem to ripple through the Germanic languages in such a way that suggests transmission from one branch to another, rather than the clean splitting into separate branches that you’d expect if the different groups had simply dispersed and stopped talking to one another.

4. A name that comes from the Roman writer Tacitus.

5. The nomenclature of this part of the world can be confusing. Here’s the usage I’m adopting: Great Britain is the name of the island containing the mainland parts of Wales, Scotland, and England. The Kingdom of Great Britain is the name of the political entity that came into being in 1707. This entity was later renamed The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, and The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1927. Since no one wants to say that whole phrase from day to day, people often refer to this political entity simply as “Britain” or “Great Britain.” The whole situation causes lots of confusion.

6. I’m excluding here Scots (and similar cases), which is more closely related to English than Frisian because it is a descendant of an earlier variety of English, either Old English or Middle English, depending on your perspective.

7. Bremmer, Rolf (1989). Late medieval and early modern opinions on the affinity between English and Frisian: the growth of a commonplace. Folia Linguistica Historica IX/1: 167–191. Bremmer actually asserts that the two languages weren’t truly mutually intelligible, but that there was a commonplace — or, in more contemporary terms, a meme — that they were.

8. Said memorably about something else that proved hard to define (fair warning: this is a link to an article about a legal case, but some people may consider it inappropriate for work).