ABSTRACT
Old English became the dominant language of England, with speakers of Celtic languages surviving in the west and north. In the Roman Empire two languages were used in administration to the exclusion of all others – Latin predominantly in the west and Greek in the east. Both were prestigious, written languages; languages of civilisation with extensive and varied literature. The languages of the largely unlettered barbarians to the north of the empire were doubtless considered primitive and inferior. The language of the Angles and Saxons, Anglo-Saxon or Old English, is so different from the English of today that one needs to learn it as one would learn modern German. Languages change over time and by the eleventh century English was showing signs of losing some of its grammatical inflection. Something then happened in that century that radically changed the vocabulary of the language.
