6. The Germanic branch is divided in three sub-branches: East Germanic, North Germanic, West Germanic,
7. West Germanic, containing Old English, Old Saxon, and Old High German. Frisian and Scots (which are sister languages of English). Additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch, English, and German, as they were each languages of colonial empires.
8. Is 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 Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century.
9. Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography. Writing conventions during the Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation
10. was a form of the English language spoken after the Norman conquest (1066) until the late 15th century.
11. Modern English as opposed to Middle English and Old English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, which began in the late 14th century and was completed in roughly 1550.
12. is the theorized common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages.
13. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. As such, Old English was a "thoroughly Germanic cousin of Dutch and German"
14. During the Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective and verb inflections were simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most grammatical case distinctions
15. The works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible are considered to be in Modern English, or more specifically, are referred to as using Early Modern English or Elizabethan English. By the late 18th century the British Empire had facilitated the spread of Modern English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance.
