The roots of English
The English we speak, read and write did not originate in England. It came from a matrix of languages growing out of a continental Indo-European language. The basic structure of our speech was imported by tribes from north-west Europe that invaded England around AD 450, after the Roman occupation. These tribes, known as Angles, Saxons and Jutes, spoke a Germanic language (characterised by initial syllable stress and grammatical inflexions) that still characterises much of dialectal English spoken today.

Old English
As Old 'Englisc' took root in 'engla'-land ('land of the Angles'), earlier Celtic invaders (with their Gaelic and Brythonic tongues) were driven north and west into north-west and south-west England, Wales and south-west Scotland. In the ninth century when the Vikings invaded, their Scandinavian Old Norse vocabulary, which shared the same Germanic roots as Old English, integrated easily into English usage.

The Norman French who invaded England in 1066, and, subsequently eastern Ireland, conquered linguistically as well as militarily. These new, educated rulers conversed in French and Latin, leaving the general population to speak their old English vernacular (The Latin word 'vernaculus' comes from the word 'verna', meaning slave or native.)

Middle English
The spelling of English sounds began to change under the influence of Old French, with changes such as the 'qu' pattern, for example, which transformed the Old English word 'cwen' into 'queen' and cwic into 'quick'. Similarly, the traditional English 'hw' pattern became reversed, so that 'hwaer' and 'hwaenne' became 'where' and 'when'. Many of the synonyms found in English - as well as the differences that we find between the pronunciation and spelling of English words - originate from this Middle English period (1066-1500).

Modern English
When William Caxton set up the first printing press in London in 1476, he chose to use the area's East Midlands dialect. As other printers followed suit, the dialect of Eastern England became the basis of today's Standard English.

Though Modern English dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century, standardised spelling was not achieved until the eighteenth century. In 1884, work began on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and it was not until its publication in 1928 that there was a definitive dictionary of the English language.

The international importance of Britain and America during the past two centuries has spread English as a native language to some 300 million people, notably across North America, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa. Another 300 million people - across Africa, India, the Caribbean and SE Asia - use English as a second language. A further 100 million speak English as a foreign language.

Comparatively fewer people speak traditional rural regional dialects today than were spoken a century ago. In modern times, people are exposed to a wider range of speech, broadcast directly into their homes, and this has resulted in 'dialect levelling'.

Though the core of English remains essentially Germanic, the global spread of the language means that it is spoken in many contrasting varieties. Modern communications technologies, combined with an increasingly mobile population, have contributed significantly in global mapping English as the world's lingua franca - the most widely used language in the world.