I. Old English (500-1100 AD) West Germanic invaders from Jutland and southern Denmark: the Angles (whose name is the source of the words England and English), Saxons, and Jutes, began populating the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. They spoke a mutually intelligible language, similar to modern Frisian—the language of northeastern region […]

The Germanic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, which were spoken by about 420 million people in many parts of the world (chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere). All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest […]

In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is a language that is spoken, signed, or written by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages (such as computer-programming languages) and from constructed languages. The classification of natural languages can be performed on the basis of different underlying principles: • paying […]

It is well known that language, whether it is English, Russian or any other, is a historical phenomenon. As such it does not stay unchanged for any considerable period of time, or for any lime at all, but it is constantly changing throughout its history. The changes affect all the spheres of the language: grammar […]