The Story of English

Born as a Germanic tongue with the arrival in Britain of the Anglo-Saxons in the early medieval period, heavily influenced by Norman French from the 11th century, and finally emerging as modern English from the late Middle Ages, the English language has grown to become the linguistic equivalent of a superpower, and is now sometimes described as the world’s lingua franca.

Worldwide some 380 million people speak English as a first language and some 600 million as a second language. A st…