This document provides an overview of an English language history course. It includes: 1) An introduction to the course objectives, including examining the geographical context and development of English. 2) Facts about the English language, including statistics about common letters and words. 3) A discussion of the backgrounds and classification of English in relation to other languages, tracing its roots back to Proto-Indo-European. 4) Maps showing the present-day distribution and historical origins of the English language.

1. ENG424: History of the
English Language
Dr. Mubarak Alkhatnai
Week 1
All presentations are made based on the course main reference: Algeo (2010) unless stated otherwise.

2. Introduction to the course
• Where is this course located.
• Why study the history of English?
• Geographical context of English
• Facts about English Language
• English Vs Englishes
• Comparative studies of languages
• Sound change

3. Map of the English-speaking world
Picture adopted with thanks from: http://eslcollege.blogspot.co.uk/

4. British Isles
Picture adopted with thanks from: http://eslcollege.blogspot.co.uk/

5. Interesting facts about English
• More English words begin with the letter “S” than any other letter of
the alphabet.
• “I” is the oldest word in the English language.
• Approximately one new word is added to the English language every
two hours.
• The dictionary grows by about 4,000 words a year.
• The most common letter in English is "e".
• The most common vowel in English is "e", followed by "a".
• The most common consonant in English is "r", followed by "t".
• Every syllable in English must have a vowel (sound). Not all
syllables have consonants.
• The following sentence contains all 26 letters of the alphabet: "The
quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

6. Backgrounds of English
• Causal comparison of English with other languages
Father
German Vater
Spanish Padre
Swedish Fader
Dutch Vader
• 200 years ago
• Proto-Indo-European = Indo-European
• Genetic classification Language families
• Language classification (Isolating Chinese , agglutinative
Turkish, incorporative Eskimo , inflective Latin).
Ch. 4 P. 61

7. Non-Indo-European Languages
• Sons of Noah
• Semitic
– Eastern
• Akkadian, called Assyrian and later Babylonian
– Western
• Hebrew (recently revived as the official language of Jews)
• Aramaic (native speech of Jesus)
• Phoenicians
• Moabitic
– Southern
• Arabic
• Ethiopic (Geez, Amharic)
• Hamitic
– Egyptian (Coptic)
– Berber dialects
– Cushitic dialects (upper Nile)
– Chadic (Chad and Nigeria)
Languages of main religions

8. • Remember:
– Up to page 66 for more on non-indo-European
languages in Africa and Asia
– According to A Guide to the World Languages by
Merritt Ruhlen (1987):
• 17 phyla of languages
• 300 major groups and subgroups
• 5000 languages
• 140 indo-European = fewer than 3% of the world’s
languages but spoken by almost half of the world’s
population.

9. Indo-European Languages
P 68-69

10. • Study the tree diagram on pages 68-69 carefully and scan through the
following 6 pages to answer the following questions:
1- On what basis IE languages were divided into Satem and Centum?
2-What is special about these languages:
• Yiddish
• Afrikans
• Pali
• Tocharian
3- In what ways Celtic and Italic are close?
4-What are the Romance languages?

11. The Celtic languages
• Celtic correspondences with Italic in the verbal system and in inflectional endings
• Celtic spread over Europe before the Christian era and before the emergence in
history of the Germanic people – reached parts of Asia Turkey
• Celts declined and their languages replaced by Latin and then French
• British Celts used their own languages and borrowed from Latin
– Angles, Saxons Jutes arrived and British Celtic languages struggled but survived
– Welsh has been promoted lately
– Britons
• Their language is Breton
• Crossed the Channel before Anglo-Saxon
• Named their country Brittany
– Cornish people
• Their language is Cornish – has been revived lately – Cornwall
– Pictish
• North-eastern parts of Britain
• Extinct
• North and central Scotland in early Middle Ages
– Settlers from Ireland “Scotti” (Scots) named their country “Scotia” (Scotland)
• Celtic language they brought is Gaelic
– Ireland was little affected by Roman or Anglo-Saxons
• Gaelic was replaced by English and recently revived

12. Germanic Languages
• English belongs to this group
• North Germanic
– Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faeroese
(Faeroe Islands)
• West Germanic
– High German, Low German, Dutch, Flemish,
Frisian, English, Yiddish
• East Germanic
– Gothic