Old English (
Englisc), also called
Anglo-Saxon,
[1] is an early form of the
English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now
England and south-eastern
Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon. It is a
West Germanic language and is closely related to
Old Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from
Old Norse, a member of the related
North Germanic group of
languages.
Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years[2] – from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the 5th century to some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066 when the language underwent a dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Vikings, who occupied and controlled large tracts of land in northern and eastern England, which came to be known as the Danelaw.
The most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar, which it shared with its sister languages in continental Europe. Some of these features are shared with the other West Germanic languages with which Old English is grouped, while some other features are traceable to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to have derived.
Like other Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental, though the instrumental was very rare), which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects (but only in the personal pronouns) in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, including those that describe inanimate objects for example, seo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mona (the Moon) was masculine (cf. modern German die Sonne and der Mond).
