9. What do you know about Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain and formation of English language?

The invaders from the 5^th and the following centuries came from various West Germanic tribes referred to as Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes. About the middle of the century these West Germanic tribes overran Britain and, for the most part colonized the island by the end of the century, though the invasion lasted in the 6^th c. A.D. too.The story of the invasion was told by Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England, HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORIUM.According to Bede the invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa; they had been invited by a British king, Vortigern, as assistants and allies in a local war. The newcomers soon dispossessed their hosts, and other Germanic bands followed. The invaders came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories; the conquest of Britain was not a migration of entire continental Germanic tribes but a process which involved numerous, and often probably, mixed bands of many continental tribes. The Britons fought against the conquerors for about a century and a half till about the year 600.The conquerors settled in Britain in the following way.The Angles occupied most of the territory north of the river the Thames up to the Firth of Forth in Scotland. The Saxons, the territory south of the Thames; the Jutes settled in Kent and in the Isle of Wight. Since the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain their language ties with the continent were broken, and its further development went its own way. It is at this time, the 5^th century A.D. that the history of the English language begins. Its original territory was England in the strict sense. The conquest of Britain by Anglo-Saxons was completed by the end of the seventh century. Members of various Germanic tribes were brought into contact with Celtic –speaking Britons. The speech of the population, living in the country, was a hybrid Anglo-British intermixture. The Old English speech community was heterogeneous. The main point to note is that these kingdoms actually spoke different languages based on the grammars, vocabularies and pronunciations of the original Germanic languages of the different tribes. West Saxon dialect, as a regional dialect, developed primarily in the South West of England, dominated at that period of the development of the English language. The spread of this standardized form of West Saxon, its knowledge and use in writing throughout England in the tenth and eleventh centuries was greatly facilitated by the political and cultural supremacy of Wessex during most of this period and the unification of England under a single crown. There are a lot of texts, records, written in West Saxon dialect found from that time.

10.What can you tell about the Scandinavian conquest of Britain?

A new language-contact situation arose when, in the last third of the ninth century, Viking war-bands from Denmark and Norway began the systematic occupation of English territory and the settlement of occupied areas in various parts of the country. This resulted in a Scandinavian-speaking community of some considerable size coming into existence in the period of Viking dominions. It was only in the battle at Edington (Wiltshire) in 878, when King Alfred won the Danes that prevented the Danes or Norsemen from becoming lords over all England and forced them to conclude a peace treaty. The Treaty of Wedmore practically meant the division of England into two parts. The Vikings promised to leave Wessex and to accept Christianity. The northern and eastern territories already belonged to the Danes. This area was called the Danelaw. The number of people of the Scandinavian stock who became permanent occupants of the conquered territory was considerable. Naturally, the massive settlement that the Scandinavians undertook led to the extensive use of the Norse tongue in the area of the Danelaw, and we can see evidence of it even today through its influences on the English language. Scandinavian vocabulary penetrated nearly every area of the English language. Most words of Scandinavian origin in English are concrete everyday words. A few examples are given here: nouns -bank, birth, booth, egg, gift, husband, law, leg, root, score, sister, skin, sky, skirt, trust, wing, window; adjectives - awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, low, odd, sly, ugly, weak, wrong; verbs – to cast, clip, crawl, cut, die, drown, gasp, give, lift, nag, scare, sprint, take, want, the present plural of ‘to be’ are; pronouns both, same, they, them and their. The facts that even the Norse pronoun ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ were accepted into English is remarkable; it is very unusual that grammatical items are borrowed. This suggests that there was extensive contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings and a gradual integration of the two groups. It can be difficult to recognize the Scandinavian words since the languages are so closely related. For example, the Old English word for ‘take’ was niman, but in late Old English tacan is found. The Old Norse word was taka, which shows that it must have been borrowed from the Scandinavians. In the same way, the word ‘law’ was originally oe but a later recording is lagu, which comes from the Old Norse. In fact, judging by the large number of Scandinavian words in the legal area, the Vikings had a considerable impact upon the law and order of the Anglo-Saxons. The Scandinavian peoples brought not only their laws and customs to the Danelaw, but their view on law and legal custom was to a great extent acknowledged by all of England.