DEFINITION

Old English was the language spoken in England from roughly 500 to 1100. Old
English (OE) is one of the Germanic languages derived from a prehistoric Common
Germanic, which was originally spoken in southern Scandinavia and the
northernmost parts of Germany.

Old English is also known as Anglo-Saxon (from the names of two of the Germanic
tribes that invaded England during the fifth century).

The most famous work of Old English literature is the epic poem Beowulf.

See Examples and Observations below. Also see:

English Language

Kenning

Key Events in the History of the English Language

Language Contact

Middle English

Modern English

Mutation

Spoken English

Written English

EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

The Lord's Prayer in Old English

Fder ure
u e eart on heofenum
si in nama gehalgod
to-becume in rice
geweore in willa on eoran swa swa on heofenum.
Urne ge dghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgifa urum gyltendum
ane ne gelde u us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfle.
(The Lord's Prayer ["Our Father"] in Old English)
 Old English Vocabulary
- "The extent to which the Anglo-Saxons overwhelmed the native Britons is
illustrated in their vocabulary. . . . Old English (the name scholars give to the
English of the Anglo-Saxons) contains barely a dozen Celtic words. . . .

"It is impossible . . . to write a modern English sentence without using a feast

of Anglo-Saxon words. Computer analysis of the language has shown that the
100 most common words in English are all of Anglo-Saxon origin. The basic
building blocks of an English sentence--the, is, you and so on--are Anglo-
Saxon. Some Old English words like mann, hus and drincan hardly need
translation."
(Robert McCrum, William Cram, and Robert MacNeill, The Story of English.
Viking, 1986)

- "It has been estimated that only about 3 per cent of Old English vocabulary
is taken from non-native sources and it is clear that the strong preference in
Old English was to use its native resources in order to create new vocabulary.
In this respect, therefore, and as elsewhere, Old English is typically
Germanic."
(Richard M. Hogg and Rhona Alcorn, An Introduction to Old English, 2nd ed.
Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

- "Although contact with other languages has radically altered the nature of its
vocabulary, English today remains a Germanic language at its core. The words
that describe family relationshipsfather, mother, brother, sonare of Old
English descent (compare Modern German Vater, Mutter, Bruder, Sohn), as
are the terms for body parts, such as foot, finger, shoulder (German Fu,
Finger, Schulter), and numerals, one, two, three, four,
five (German eins, zwei, drei, vier, fnf) as well as its grammatical words,
such as and, for, I (German und, fr, Ich)."
(Simon Horobin, How English Became English. Oxford University Press,
2016)

Old English (and Old Norse) Grammar

- "Languages which make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary
verbs and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known
as analyticlanguages. Modern English is an analytic, Old English a synthetic
language. In its grammar, Old English resembles modern German.
Theoretically, the nounand adjective are inflected for four cases in the singular
and four in the plural, although the forms are not always distinctive, and in
addition the adjective has separate forms for each of the three genders.
The inflection of the verb is less elaborate than that of the Latin verb, but
there are distinctive endings for the different persons, numbers, tenses,
and moods."
(A. C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 1978)

- "Even before the arrival of the Normans [in 1066], Old

English was changing. In the Danelaw, the Old Norse of the Viking settlers
was combining with the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons in new and
interesting ways. In the poem The Battle of Maldon, . . . grammatical
 confusion in the speech of one of the Viking characters has been interpreted
by some commentators as an attempt to represent an Old Norse speaker
struggling with Old English. The languages were closely related, and both
relied very much on the endings of words--what we call 'inflexions'--to signal
grammatical information. Often these grammatical inflexions were the main
thing that distinguished otherwise similar words in Old English and Old
Norse. For example, the word 'worm' or 'serpent' used as theobject of a
sentence would have been orminn in Old Norse, and simply wyrm in Old
English. The result was that as the two communities strove to communicate
with each other, the inflexions became blurred and eventually disappeared.
The grammatical information that they signaled had to be expressed using
different resources, and so the nature of the English language began to
change. New reliance was put on the order of words and on the meanings of
little grammatical words like to, with, in, over, and around."
(Carole Hough and John Corbett, Beginning Old English, 2nd ed. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013)

Old English and the Alphabet

"The success of English was all the more surprising in that it was not really a
written language, not at first. The Anglo-Saxons used a runic alphabet, the
kind of writing J.R.R. Tolkien recreated for The Lord of the Rings, and one
more suitable for stone inscriptions than shopping lists. It took the arrival of
Christianity to spread literacy and to produce the letters of an alphabet which,
with a very few differences, is still in use today."
(Philip Gooden, The Story of English. Quercus, 2009)

Differences Between Old English and Modern English

"There is no point . . . in playing down the differences between Old and
Modern English, for they are obvious at a glance. The rules for spelling Old
English were different from the rules for spelling Modern English, and that
accounts for some of the difference. But there are more substantial changes as
well. The threevowels that appeared in the inflectional endings of Old English
words were reduced to one in Middle English, and then most inflectional
endings disappeared entirely. Most case distinctions were lost; so were most
of the endings added to verbs, even while the verb system became more
complex, adding such features as a future tense, a perfect and a pluperfect.
While the number of endings was reduced, the order of elements within
clauses and sentences became more fixed, so that (for example) it came to
sound archaic and awkward to place an object before the verb, as Old English
had frequently done."
(Peter S. Baker, Introduction to Old English. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003)

Celtic Influence on English

"In linguistic terms, obvious Celtic influence on English was minimal, except
forplace- and river-names . . .. Latin influence was much more important,
particularly for vocabulary . . .. However, recent work has revived the
suggestion that Celtic may have had considerable effect on low-status, spoken
varieties ofOld English, effects which only became evident in
the morphology and syntaxof written English after the Old English period . . ..
Advocates of this still controversial approach variously provide some striking
evidence of coincidence of forms between Celtic languages and English, a
historical framework for contact, parallels from modern creole studies, and--
sometimes--the suggestion that Celtic influence has been systematically
downplayed because of a lingering Victorian concept of condescending
English nationalism."
(David Denison and Richard Hogg, "Overview." A History of the English
Language, ed. by Hogg and Denison. Cambridge University Press, 2008