Old English is the earliest attested stage of the English language, spoken and written in England from roughly the mid-fifth century (the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain) through the late eleventh century (the Norman Conquest of 1066). It is a West Germanic language descended from Proto-Germanic, closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon.
Old English retained much of the synthetic morphology of its Germanic ancestor: four grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), strong and weak noun declensions, strong and weak verb conjugations, and a relatively free word order enabled by its case system. The language had a vocabulary almost entirely Germanic in origin, with limited Latin borrowings (mostly from Christianization) and some Old Norse influence in the Danelaw regions.
The major dialects of Old English were Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Most surviving Old English literature is in the West Saxon dialect, which became a literary standard under Alfred the Great (871–899). The corpus includes poetry (Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood), prose (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ælfric’s homilies), legal texts, and translations.
Related
- Proto-Germanic
- Anglo-Norman (the French language that displaced Old English in elite contexts after 1066)
- Kentish (an Old English dialect)