How Old English Developed from the Germanic Tribes

Short answer

• Old English developed from the West Germanic dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, Germanic peoples who settled in Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries after Roman rule ended. Their related dialects mixed and changed in their new home, replacing the Celtic language and Latin of Roman Britain, and together they became the language scholars call Old English. It was first written in runes, then in a version of the Latin alphabet brought by Christian missionaries, and it grew four main dialects, of which West Saxon became the language of most surviving literature. Old English was spoken and written in England before 1100, and it is the direct ancestor of Middle English and Modern English.

Before English: The Languages of Roman Britain

English was not native to Britain. Before the Germanic settlers arrived, the island spoke other languages, and understanding them explains why Old English looks the way it does.

The language of most of the native Britons was Common Brittonic, a Celtic language related to modern Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Latin was the second language of the island. It had arrived with the Roman conquest and was the language of the army, the administration, the towns, and, in the later Roman period, the church. When Roman rule ended, Latin did not vanish overnight, but it lost its institutions. It survived mainly in the church and in the small number of educated people who could still read and write it.

Britain was therefore multilingual long before English arrived, just as large regions today hold many languages at once. Our explainer on Africa in African language shows how a single continent can hold hundreds of languages, and early medieval Britain was a smaller version of the same pattern, with Celtic speech in most places and Latin in the towns and churches.

The Germanic settlers did not borrow much from either language at first. Old English kept only a small number of Celtic words, mostly in place names such as Thames and Kent, which still carry their Celtic roots on the modern map. Latin contributed more, but in waves, as this article explains below. The plain fact is that the settlers replaced the languages of Roman Britain rather than merging with them. By the time the new kingdoms were established, the language of most of lowland Britain was Germanic, and the Celtic languages survived mainly in the west and north, in Wales, Cornwall, and parts of the north.

That replacement is one reason the history of English starts with a migration rather than with a slow local change. The language crossed the North Sea in boats, with people who brought their own speech, their own gods, and their own customs, and it took root in a land where it had never been spoken before.

Who Were the Germanic Tribes?

The three peoples named in the traditional story are the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The monk Bede, writing his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the early 8th century, names these three as the peoples who settled Britain, and his account has shaped every later telling of the story. According to Bede, the Angles came from Angeln, the Saxons from what he calls Old Saxony, and the Jutes from Jutland. Modern scholarship accepts the broad picture while treating the details with care, because Bede was writing about 300 years after the events.

The Angles came from Angeln, a small district in what is now Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, between the Saxons to the south and the Jutes to the north. The Saxons lived further south and west, in the low coastal lands around the lower Elbe and Weser, in what is now Lower Saxony and neighboring parts of the Netherlands. The Jutes came from the Jutland peninsula, the land that forms most of modern Denmark. Frisians, from the marshy coasts of what is now the Netherlands and northwestern Germany, also joined the movement, and later writers sometimes add them as a fourth group.

None of these peoples was a single unified nation in the modern sense. Each name covered a loose grouping of related peoples who shared a language, customs, and military traditions rather than one tightly ruled state. That matters for the language story, because it means the settlers did not bring one uniform tongue. They brought a cluster of closely related West Germanic dialects, sometimes called Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects, which were similar enough for their speakers to understand each other but different enough to leave traces in the dialects of Old English.

For the people themselves, see our companion article on what is a Saxon, which explains the Saxons in detail, and our guide to English to Anglo-Saxon, which traces the language connection from the other direction.

The word English itself comes from this story. Old English Englisc meant pertaining to the Angles, and the land the settlers built became Englaland, the land of the Angles, which shortened over time to England. The Angles gave the country its name even though the Saxons founded some of its most important kingdoms, a naming puzzle that still confuses readers today.

The Move to Britain: Invasion, Migration, or Both?

The traditional story, told most famously by Bede, is dramatic. After the Roman army withdrew from Britain in about 410, a British ruler named Vortigern supposedly invited Saxon warriors as mercenaries to help defend his kingdom against the Picts and Scots from the north. Those warriors then turned on their hosts, invited more of their kin across the sea, and seized land for themselves. Bede gives the traditional date of 449 for the start of this settlement, and he assigns the kingdoms that followed: the Saxons founded Essex, Sussex, and Wessex, the Angles founded East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria, and the Jutes founded Kent and the Isle of Wight.

Modern historians treat that story with respect and with caution. Bede wrote centuries after the events, using earlier writers such as Gildas, oral tradition, and the records available to a Northumbrian monastery. His account preserves a real memory of migration and conflict, but its details, including named leaders such as Hengist and Horsa, are now treated as partly legendary. The date 449 is a traditional marker, not a firmly documented landing date.

Archaeology has also changed the picture. Evidence suggests that the first migrants from the Germanic areas of mainland Europe, including settlers from Frisia, arrived before the Roman withdrawal in about 410, not only after it. Germanic soldiers had already served in Roman Britain, and Germanic traders and raiders had crossed the North Sea for generations. The settlement was therefore less a sudden invasion in a single year and more a gradual movement of peoples over several generations, with raiding, trading, mercenary service, and settlement overlapping.

The scale of the migration is debated as well. Older histories often imagined a mass invasion that replaced the British population entirely. More recent scholarship, drawing on archaeology, place names, and genetic studies, tends toward a smaller but politically powerful migration: a warrior elite and their followers who seized power in eastern and southern Britain, while much of the existing population stayed, farmed, and gradually adopted the newcomers’ language and customs. Britannica summarizes the result plainly: the Anglo-Saxons were an admixture of Germanic migrants, the preexisting Celtic inhabitants of Britain, and later Viking and Danish invaders.

What is not in doubt is the outcome. By the 6th and 7th centuries, Germanic kingdoms controlled much of what is now England, while British kingdoms survived in the west and north. The settlers had not arrived in an empty land, and they had not erased the people they found. They had founded kingdoms on top of a living British society, and their language had become the language of power in most of lowland Britain.

From Tribal Speech to Old English

Old English did not arrive in Britain fully formed. It developed in Britain, over about 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman Conquest. The first Old English literature dates from the mid-7th century, which means the language had already been changing in its new home for about 200 years before anyone wrote it down in the form we can read today.

Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages. Its closest relatives were Old Frisian and Old Saxon, the languages of the peoples who stayed on the continent. That closeness is visible in everyday words. Old English and Old Frisian share basic vocabulary for family, farming, the sea, and the body, because both descend from the same North Sea Germanic dialects. Modern English still carries that inheritance in its most common words, including house, water, earth, father, mother, and child, which all have Germanic roots.

The change from a cluster of tribal dialects into one language happened because the settlers lived together in one island, under kings who married, allied, fought, and traded with each other. Dialects that had been separated by the North Sea now sat side by side in neighboring kingdoms. Speakers adjusted to each other, shared words, and smoothed out differences, while keeping local features that marked them as Mercians, Northumbrians, Kentishmen, or West Saxons.

It is impossible to say exactly when English became a separate language rather than just a German dialect. The change was gradual, and the boundary is a matter of convention. By about 600, the language had begun to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, and by the time the first literature appeared, it was clearly a language of its own, even though a traveler from Frisia might still have understood much of it.

The Four Dialects and Why West Saxon Won the Pen

Old English had four main dialects, each associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Northumbrian was spoken in northern England and southeastern Scotland. Mercian was spoken in central England, in the kingdom of Mercia. Kentish was spoken in southeastern England, in Kent. West Saxon was spoken in southern and southwestern England, in Wessex. Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped together as the Anglian dialects, because both descend from the speech of the Angles.

The dialect areas can be traced back quite clearly to the tribes that settled Britain. The Angles settled mainly in the middle and north, the Saxons in the south, and the Jutes in Kent, and the dialects follow that settlement pattern. A traveler in the 8th century would have heard different words, different pronunciations, and different spellings as they moved from kingdom to kingdom, in much the same way that modern English still varies by region.

Not all dialects left equal records. Most surviving Old English writings are in the West Saxon dialect, and West Saxon formed the basis for the literary standard of the later Old English period. That was not because West Saxon was the most widely spoken dialect. It was because Wessex became the most powerful kingdom. Under King Alfred, who reigned from 871 to 899, Wessex held out against Viking armies that had overrun the other kingdoms, and Alfred’s children and grandchildren pushed Viking power back and united the English kingdoms. The first great period of literary activity in Old English occurred during Alfred’s reign, and the books produced at his court set the standard that later scribes followed.

That accident of politics has a lasting consequence for modern readers. When we read Old English today, we usually read West Saxon, and we can easily mistake one dialect for the whole language. The other dialects survive in smaller numbers of texts, in glosses, in place names, and in the earliest poetry. The oldest surviving Old English poem, Caedmon’s Hymn, comes down to us in a Northumbrian version, a reminder that the north had its own literary life before Wessex took the lead.

There is also an irony in the dialect story. Although West Saxon became the written standard, the dominant forms of Middle and Modern English developed mainly through the Mercian-derived East Midland dialect, and Scots developed from Northumbrian. The dialect that won the pen was not the dialect that won the future. For a wider view of the kings who shaped this world, including Alfred, see our guide to the kings of the Middle Ages.

Runes: The First Writing

Before the Germanic settlers learned the Latin alphabet, they wrote in runes. The runic alphabet was a writing system used by Germanic peoples of northern Europe, Britain, Scandinavia, and Iceland from about the 3rd century to the 16th or 17th century. Its origin is uncertain, but scholars generally derive it from one of the alphabets of the Mediterranean area, probably through contact with Roman or Etruscan letters.

The early Germanic runic alphabet had 24 letters, divided into three groups of eight. Its name, futhark, comes from the sounds of its first six letters: f, u, th, a, r, and k. That is the same idea as the word alphabet, which comes from the first two Greek letters. The Anglo-Saxon version, called the futhorc, expanded the futhark to fit the sounds of Old English. It had 28 letters, and after about 900 it had 33, with new signs added for vowel sounds that the older alphabet could not represent.

Runes were a carving alphabet. Their straight lines suited wood, bone, metal, and stone, and their shapes were designed to be cut rather than written with a pen. That is why runic inscriptions are usually short: a name on a sword, a memorial on a stone, a few words on a brooch. A gold bracteate found in 1981 at Undley Common in Suffolk, thought to date from as early as 450 to 480, bears runes spelling out words that may be the earliest known English inscription, and it shows that runes were in use in Britain within a generation of the settlement.

The oldest coherent runic texts in Old English, including the inscriptions on the Franks Casket, date to the early 8th century. Runes were used in Britain from the 5th or 6th century to about the 12th century, but after the 9th century they were used mainly in manuscripts and were of interest chiefly to scholars, while the Latin alphabet did the everyday work of writing. Runes did leave a lasting mark on English spelling: they donated two symbols to the Old English alphabet, and the name of the letter ash, the symbol for the vowel in the word ash, comes from the rune of the same name.

The Latin Alphabet Arrives with Christianity

The change from runes to the Latin alphabet came with Christianity. A key moment was 597, when Augustine of Canterbury arrived from Rome on a mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great. Christianity reached Anglo-Saxon England in stages, with Roman missionaries in the southeast based at Canterbury and Irish missionaries in the north based on Lindisfarne, but the Roman mission of 597 is the conventional starting point for the change in writing.

Christianity brought with it a tradition of Latin literacy: reading, writing, and copying books. The Christian world was built around manuscripts, above all the Bible, written in Latin letters. Monasteries such as Monkwearmouth-Jarrow and Canterbury became centers of learning where monks copied texts, taught pupils, and produced books. The Christianization of England over the decades following Augustine’s mission introduced not only the Roman alphabet, which gradually displaced the use of runes, but also parchment and vellum as writing surfaces, which made it practical to create long documents for the first time.

The Latin alphabet was not a perfect fit for Old English, so Anglo-Saxon scribes modified and extended it. They kept some runic letters for sounds Latin could not represent, and they adapted letter shapes to English sounds. The result was an Old English alphabet written in Latin letters but shaped by English needs, and it is the ancestor of the alphabet used for English today.

The earliest known text in Old English is a law code, the laws of King Aethelberht of Kent, who died in 616, which means the original must have been written before that date. The first Old English literature dates from the mid-7th century, and Caedmon’s Hymn, a short poem about the Creation, is commonly described as the earliest surviving Old English poem. It was composed in the late 7th century, according to Bede, by a cowherd at the monastery of Whitby who received the gift of song in a dream. Whether or not the dream is true, the poem’s survival in Bede’s history shows that English was already being used for serious religious poetry within a century of Augustine’s mission. For the language of the Bible itself, which drove so much of this translation work, see our article on what language was the Bible written in.

How the Language Itself Changed

Old English looked and sounded very different from modern English, and the differences go beyond spelling. Three kinds of change matter most: sounds, grammar, and vocabulary.

The sound changes began on the continent and continued in Britain. One of the most famous is Grimm’s law, a set of sound shifts that separated the Germanic languages from their Indo-European relatives. Latin pater became English father, because the p sound shifted to f, and Latin ped became English foot, because the same shift turned p into f and d into t. These regular changes are why English words so often resemble Latin words with shifted consonants, and they are the fingerprint that proves English belongs to the Germanic family.

A second sound change, called i-mutation or umlaut, happened in the earliest, pre-literary stages of Old English itself. When a vowel in the following syllable pulled a root vowel forward in the mouth, the root vowel changed. That is why foot becomes feet and man becomes men in the plural, and why mouse becomes mice. The plural did not come from adding an ending. It came from a sound change that later became the only mark of the plural once the endings wore away.

The grammar of Old English was far more inflected than modern English. In contrast to Modern English, Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, in the noun and adjective, and nouns, pronouns, and adjectives were inflected for case. Noun and adjective paradigms contained four cases, nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative, while pronouns also had forms for the instrumental case. Word order was freer than it is today, because the endings showed who did what to whom. A modern reader who expects the subject to come first will find Old English sentences that put the object first and still make sense, because the case endings carry the meaning.

Old English also had a greater proportion of strong verbs than Modern English. Strong verbs change their root vowel to mark the past tense, as in sing, sang, sung, while weak verbs add an ending, as in walk, walked. In Old English, helpan was a strong verb: healp in the past singular, hulpon in the past plural, holpen in the past participle. In Modern English, help is a weak verb: help, helped, helped. Many strong verbs became weak over time, which is one reason the grammar simplified.

Vocabulary changed in layers, and each layer records a meeting with another people. The Celtic layer is thin, mostly place names. The Latin layer came in two waves: a few words from the Roman period, such as street from the Latin strata, candle, and wine, and a much larger group from the church after conversion, including words such as school, bishop, and monk. The Norse layer came later, after Viking settlement, and it is surprisingly deep. Words such as sky, egg, window, and the pronouns they, them, and their all come from Old Norse, and they show how closely the settlers and the Anglo-Saxons lived together in the north and east. English kept absorbing words from its neighbors, a pattern visible in multilingual countries today, such as the Philippines, where many languages live side by side, as our article on what language do they speak in the Philippines explains.

Beowulf and the Flowering of Old English Literature

The greatest work of Old English literature is Beowulf, an epic poem about a hero who fights the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and finally a dragon. The poem survives in a single manuscript, the Nowell Codex, held by the British Library as Cotton MS Vitellius A XV. The manuscript was made around the year 1000, most likely during the reign of King Aethelred the Unready, who reigned from 978 to 1016, and it contains more than 3,000 lines. The poem itself was probably composed earlier, and in some scholars’ opinions it had been passed down for centuries between generations of storytellers before it was written down.

The manuscript’s survival was narrow. It was damaged by fire in 1731, when a fire broke out at Ashburnham House in London, and many letters crumbled away from the edges of its pages in the years that followed. It was placed in paper frames in 1845, and it remains fragile today. That a single fire could have erased the greatest poem in the language shows how little Old English literature survives. What we have is a fraction of what was written, and the fraction that survives is mostly West Saxon, mostly religious, and mostly copied in monasteries.

Beowulf was not the only achievement. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year by year record of events in England kept in monasteries from the late 9th century onward, is the other great monument of Old English prose. Alfred’s translations of Latin works, including Bede’s history and Boethius, brought learning into English for the first time. Homilies, saints’ lives, riddles, and charms filled out a literature that ranged from high theology to everyday practical knowledge. Together they prove that Old English was not a crude tribal tongue. It was a full literary language, capable of epic poetry, history, law, science, and prayer.

The End of Old English: 1066 and After

The Old English period ends, by convention, in 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest. When Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, Harold Godwinson was crowned king, and William, Duke of Normandy, invaded to claim the throne. Harold was defeated and killed at Hastings in October 1066, and William was crowned king at Westminster on Christmas Day. Norman rule replaced Saxon rule at the top of English society, and Norman French became the language of court, law, and government.

The Conquest did not wipe out the English language. Norman kings kept many Saxon institutions, including shires, sheriffs, and coinage, and ordinary people went on speaking English. But the ruling class changed completely, and for about 300 years English was the language of the lower orders, rarely written in official documents. During that time it changed rapidly. The case endings wore away, the genders faded, the vocabulary absorbed thousands of French words, and the language that emerged in the 12th century was Middle English, recognizably the same language but far closer to the English of today.

The year 1066 is therefore a convenient marker rather than a sharp break. Old English did not die on the battlefield at Hastings. It faded over generations, as the children of English speakers grew up in a world where French was the language of power and English was the language of home. The transition took two or more generations, and it was still under way well into the 12th century. What ended in 1066 was the world that had produced Old English literature: the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, their courts, and their monasteries. What survived was the language itself, changed but unbroken, in the mouths of the people who spoke it.

Why This History Still Shows in Modern English

The Germanic tribes are still present in the English spoken today, in ways that are easy to miss. The most common words in English are Germanic: the, and, I, you, he, she, it, house, home, water, earth, hand, foot, heart, love, hate, live, die, eat, drink, sleep, and wake. The grammar is Germanic too: the way we form the past tense, the way we make plurals, and the way we build compound words such as houseboat and sunbeam all come from Old English.

The place names of England carry the settlement map in plain sight. The endings by, thorpe, and thwaite mark Norse settlement in the north and east. The names Essex, Sussex, Wessex, and Middlesex mark Saxon kingdoms. Kent marks the Jutes. The rivers Thames and Kent carry Celtic names that survived the whole upheaval. To read an English map is to read the history of the language.

The story also explains why English spelling is so irregular. English spelling froze at different times for different words, and it keeps the traces of sounds that have long since changed. The silent k in knight, the gh in night, and the odd spelling of enough all make sense once you know that Old English pronounced those letters and that the sounds changed after the spelling was fixed. English is not a badly spelled language. It is a language whose spelling preserves its history, and the oldest layer of that history is the Germanic speech of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Old English develop from the Germanic tribes?

Old English developed from the West Germanic dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who settled in Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries. Their related dialects mixed in their new home, changed over about 700 years, and became a single language with four main dialects. It was first written in runes and later in the Latin alphabet, and it is the direct ancestor of Modern English.

Who were the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes?

They were three Germanic peoples named by Bede as the settlers of Britain. The Angles came from Angeln in what is now northern Germany, the Saxons from lands around the lower Elbe, and the Jutes from the Jutland peninsula in modern Denmark. Frisians and other groups joined them. Together with the Britons already living in Britain, they formed the population of Anglo-Saxon England.

When did the Germanic tribes settle in Britain?

Settlement grew during the 5th and 6th centuries, after the Roman army withdrew in about 410. The traditional date of 449, taken from Bede, is a conventional marker rather than a firmly documented landing. Archaeology suggests some Germanic settlers arrived before the Roman withdrawal, and the movement continued over several generations rather than happening in a single invasion.

What are the four dialects of Old English?

The four main dialects were Northumbrian in the north, Mercian in the Midlands, Kentish in the southeast, and West Saxon in the south and southwest. Mercian and Northumbrian are often grouped as the Anglian dialects. Most surviving literature is in West Saxon, because Wessex became the most powerful kingdom, but Modern English descends mainly through the Mercian-derived East Midland dialect.

What are Old English runes?

Old English runes, called the futhorc, were the first writing system used for English. They developed from the 24 letter Elder Futhark of the Germanic peoples and were expanded to 28 letters, and later 33, to fit the sounds of Old English. Runes were carved on wood, bone, metal, and stone, and were used in Britain from the 5th or 6th century to about the 12th century, though the Latin alphabet replaced them for most writing after the 7th century.

How did Christianity change Old English?

Christianity brought the Latin alphabet, Latin literacy, and parchment to England, starting with Augustine’s mission from Rome in 597. Monasteries became centers of writing, and monks began writing English in Latin letters. The church also brought many Latin loanwords into English, including school, bishop, and monk, and it made possible the first Old English literature.

Is Old English the same as Anglo-Saxon?

The two terms overlap but are not identical. Old English is the name for the language, spoken and written in England before 1100. Anglo-Saxon is the name for the peoples, the period, and the culture, from the 5th century to the Norman Conquest in 1066. Writers sometimes use Anglo-Saxon for the language as well, but careful histories keep the language and the peoples apart.

When did Old English become Middle English?

The change was gradual, but 1066 is the conventional marker. After the Norman Conquest, English lost its position as the language of government, its case endings wore away, and it absorbed many French words. Over the next two centuries it changed into Middle English, which is far closer to the English spoken today. For the wider question of which languages are oldest, see our article on the earliest language of the world.

Sources & references

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Old English language": Old English spoken and written in England before 1100, ancestor of Middle English and Modern English, placed in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages; four dialects Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon, with Mercian and Northumbrian classed as Anglian; most extant writings in West Saxon; first great period of literary activity under King Alfred in the 9th century; three genders, four cases, and strong verb example helpan, healp, hulpon, holpen.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Anglo-Saxon": Anglo-Saxons as Germanic peoples inhabiting England and Wales from the 5th century to the Norman Conquest in 1066; Bede's three peoples Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; Vortigern invitation; Roman withdrawal about 410; kingdom assignments Essex, Sussex, and Wessex as Saxon, East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria as Angle, and Kent as Jute; admixture of Germanic migrants, Celtic inhabitants, and Viking and Danish invaders; term first used by continental writers in the late 8th century; 26 years of Danish rule from 1016 under Canute.
• British Library, "Hwæt! Beowulf online" and Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue entry for Cotton MS Vitellius A XV: the Beowulf manuscript made around the year 1000, most likely during the reign of King Aethelred the Unready (978 to 1016); the poem contains more than 3,000 lines; the sole surviving medieval copy, held as Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, ff. 132r to 201v; the Nowell Codex dates from the end of the 10th century or the early decades of the 11th century; damaged by fire in 1731 and placed in paper frames in 1845.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Runic alphabet": runic alphabet used by Germanic peoples from about the 3rd century to the 16th or 17th century; early Germanic script of 24 letters, name futhark from the first six letters f, u, th, a, r, and k; Anglo-Saxon script of 28 letters, and 33 after about 900; Anglo-Saxon runes used in Britain from the 5th or 6th century to about the 12th century.
• Geoffrey Sampson, "The Evolution of Written English", in Meletis et al., Handbook of Germanic Writing Systems: Christianization following Augustine's mission from Pope Gregory in 597 introduced the Roman alphabet and parchment; the law code of Aethelberht, king of Kent, who died in 616, is the earliest known Old English text; the gold bracteate found in 1981 at Undley Common in Suffolk, thought to date from as early as 450 to 480, bearing runes; England from Old English Englalond, the land of the Angles.
• Dr. Raymond Hickey, "The Origins and Dialects of Old English", Brewminate: Bede's 449 arrival date; the three settler groups Angles, Saxons, and Jutes and their settlement areas; Angles from Angeln in present day Schleswig-Holstein, Saxons from east and central Lower Saxony, Jutes from the Jutland peninsula; dialect areas traced to the settling tribes.
• Old English, standard reference summary (Wikipedia, "Old English" / "Anglo-Saxon language"): Old English developed from Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; first Old English literature from the mid-7th century; usage covered about 700 years from the 5th century settlement to the late 11th century; 1066 regarded as marking the end of the Old English era; closest relatives Old Frisian and Old Saxon; oldest inscriptions in runes, replaced by the Latin alphabet from the 7th century; futhorc derived from the 24 character Elder Futhark extended by five runes; oldest coherent runic texts, including the Franks Casket, date to the early 8th century; West Saxon formed the basis for the literary standard of the later Old English period, while the dominant forms of Middle and Modern English developed mainly from Mercian and Scots from Northumbrian.
• Standard scholarly summaries of early medieval England consulted for the general framework: Augustine's mission to Kent in 597; the Synod of Whitby in 664; Alfred's reign 871 to 899; the Battle of Hastings in October 1066 and William's coronation at Christmas 1066; Grimm's law and i-mutation as standard accounts of Germanic sound change; Old Norse loanwords including they, them, their, sky, egg, and window; Latin loanwords including street from strata, candle, school, and wine; Celtic survival in place names such as Thames and Kent; Caedmon's Hymn as the earliest surviving Old English poem, composed in the late 7th century according to Bede.