Informative Speech Audience Assessment

Origins of English

Specific Goal: Get my audience to be fascinated and curious about the English language and it’s
origins.

My Narrowed Topic:
a) Strategy: I’ll teach my topic by sharing a general history, as well as documented
examples.

b) Narrow Focus:
a. Original topic: The history of our language.
b. Narrower topic: How English is related to Scandinavian languages
c. Even narrower topic: English has specifically evolved from what it once was.
Ethos:
a) Primary Ethos: I have a fascination for languages, I speak two Germanic languages and
have studied others. My Granddad was the chair of the U of U English department and
raised me with this passion.

b) Secondary Ethos: I will cite Scholarly journals, thesis, and the bible.

Audience Knowledge Level: Very surface level knowledge if any.

Adaptation to Audience Knowledge: I will focus on explaining at a very common level and try
to be excited about the topic.
Pattern of Organization: Topical
 Informative Speech Full Sentence Outline
Origins of English

Introduction:
Hook: We use words and speech every day to communicate, manipulate, express, and portray.
Our language creates for us a heritage and identity that many of us may not even understand.
Thesis: The English language has evolved spectacularly in the modern age to include elements
from all other language families. Understanding clearly its origins, however, gives its speaker a
greater appreciation for its qualities.
Preview:
1. Origins of English
2. Transformation and old relation to Scandinavia.

Transition: So let’s take a trip back in time to when no western language we know of today was
spoken.

Body:
I. Linguists have classified the oldest known Western language as Proto-Indo-European, or
Indo-European.
A. The Proto-Indo European Language divided over thousands of years into families
and sub groups within those families.
i. Italic family includes the Romance languages, or all languages that stem
from Latin.
ii. Hellenic Languages were Ancient and Modern Greek
iii. The Celtic Languages comprising of Gaelic, Cornish, and Welsh.
iv. The Germanic tree however was the biggest influence on the English
language.

Transition: So lets look back in time to the 5th century when the organs of English, Anglo-Saxon,
was beginning.

II. English has a large evolutionary history.

A. There has been a lot of influence and adoptions of words from other languages
into modern English.
i. English was dramatically changed during the Norman conquest.
“a study of 80,000 words of the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary points out
that English, which is a Germanic language, has borrowed 56.5 % of its
total lexicon from Old French (Langue d’oïl) and Latin, 5.3 % from Greek,
13.2 % from other languages, and has inherited only 25 % of its current
lexicon from its direct ancestor, Old Germanic”(Willems)

B. English used to be understandable to Scandinavians

i. Comparisons of the Lord’s Prayer, and common words.

 ii. Evidence from the Sagas, that languages were interexchange able.

“Ólafur mælti og svarar svo á írsku sem þeir mæltu til. “Ólafr spoke and answered in
Irish, as they spoke.”(Gay)

“Ein var þá tungu á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmörku. “One was the tongue in
England as in Norway and in Denmark”(Gay)

iii. Other common words that are still used today in English.

Transition to close- From Proto-Indo-European to the fjords of Scandinavia and northern

Germany across continents and cultures, wars and wilderness, from an eastern coast to a
western coast, and now centuries later in a SLCC class room the language that we use so
casually and call our own has seen quite a bit.

Conclusion:
Review thesis/main points: The evolution for our language has evolved immensely, and to truly
understand and appreciate it we must understand and know its history.
Bookend: There is no doubt that the English language is had a global and historical impact on
the very course of our planet.
Memorable Closer: Other countries have their own languages and have held them for
hundreds of years. We inherited English, but in our own day and age have adapted it. English is
now personal, we choose how we want it to sound we choose what we want to say, and in that
way, moving forward, we have made our own language.
References:

Willems, M., Laforest, L., Makarenkov, V., Lord, E., Lapointe, F., Labelle, G., & Di Sciullo,
A. M. (2016). Using hybridization networks to retrace the evolution of Indo-European
languages. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 161-18. doi:10.1186/s12862-016-0745-6

Gay, E. M.(2014). OLD ENGLISH AND OLD NORSE: AN INQUIRY INTO INTELLIGIBILITY AND
CATEGORIZATION METHODOLOGY. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from
http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/2604

"The Lords Prayer in Old English(Anglo-Saxon)." Lords prayer words - traditional and
contemporary prayers. Accessed March 12, 2018. http://www.lords-prayer-
words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html.

Faðir vor. (n.d.). Retrieved March 12, 2018, from

https://is.wikisource.org/wiki/Fa%C3%B0ir_vor