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Middle English is the form of English spoken roughly from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the end of the 15th century. For centuries after the Conquest, the Norman kings and high-ranking nobles in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles spoke Anglo-Norman , a variety of Old Norman , originating from a northern ...
Middle English (abbreviated to ME [1]) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period.
The oldest Middle English texts that were written by the Augustinian canon Orrm, which highlights the blending of both Old English and Anglo-Norman elements in English for the first time. In Wycliff'e Bible of the 1380s, the verse Matthew 8:20 was written: Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heuene han nestis . [ 51 ]
Old English (Englisċ or Ænglisc, pronounced [ˈeŋɡliʃ]), or Anglo-Saxon, [1] was the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages.
It was brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers, and was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland until the mid-12th century, by which time it had evolved into Middle English. Old English was a West Germanic language, closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon (Old Low German).
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, [1] [2] making it the largest language by number of speakers, the third largest language by number of native speakers and the most widespread language geographically.
The English language was introduced to the Americas by the arrival of the English, beginning in the late 16th century.The language also spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and settlement and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, included 470–570 million people, about a quarter of the world's population.
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, [b] is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. [4] English is the most widely spoken language in the United States .