English

Old English, the speech of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who settled in Britain from the fifth century, produced a written literature from Beowulf to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Its Norse words came from Danish settlers in the north and east.

After 1066 French became the language of the court and the law, and English, spoken mainly by the common people, absorbed a large Romance vocabulary. By the fourteenth century it was regaining ground: the Pleading in English Act of 1362 admitted it to the law courts, and Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the London dialect.

William Caxton's press at Westminster, opened in 1476, helped settle a written standard, later shaped by the King James Bible of 1611 and Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755.