ABSTRACT
According to Toronto University Dictionary of Old English Corpus the entire body of Old English material from 600 to 1150 consists of only 3037 texts, amounting to a mere three million words. Alongside West Saxon, three other dialects are known from the Old English period, deriving from the names of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian, with the last two sometimes grouped together as a northern variety, Anglian. The Scandinavian place names are one of the most important linguistic developments of the period. In the case of English there is a special irony, for its vocabulary has never been purely Anglo-Saxon not even in the Anglo-Saxon period. By the time the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, there had already been four centuries of linguistic interchange between Germanic and Roman people on the European mainland. The phrase increasing reliance is meant to suggest that there is a great deal of continuity between the grammatical systems of Old and Middle English.
