The Origin of English

The furthest back English can be traced is Proto-Indo-European that evolved at least 6000 years ago and probably originated in the Caucasian Mountains bordering modern Turkey. Our ancient ancestors gradually moved north and westward into Europe and some wandered still farther north and settled in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. By about 1000 B.C., the language of these Germanic tribes had evolved into Proto-Germanic or Primitive Germanic or Common Germanic. In turn, the Proto-Germanic language evolved into 11 Germanic languages:

The people who moved north (North Germanic) and stayed, spoke Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Proto Germanic speaking tribes that moved west (West Germanic) developed German (high and low), Dutch, Flemish and Frisian which evolved into English.

Many features of Old English (OE) look a lot like German because the roots of OE are in Proto-Germanic, a subset of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages.  Like modern German, all the nouns in OE, including inanimate objects, are neutral, feminine or masculine. OE has no Latin or French words, there are hundreds of strong (irregular) verbs, the word order is not fixed and nouns change their form or endings when they are the subject or the object or if they are possessive etc. 

The first inhabitants of Britain were the primitive Celts. In 55 B.C. when the Roman army under Julius Caesar first attempted to invade Britain, English did not exist. The Romans never penetrated far into Scotland or Wales. By the end of the Roman occupation in 410 A.D., the Celts, who the Romans had eventually converted to Christianity, were too weak to defend themselves against the Picts / Scots from the north and had started to look for allies.

The origin of the word “English” begins in 449 A.D. when according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, established under Alfred the Great (871-899), the Celt King, Vortigern, promised land in the southeast to Anglum (Angles) if it helped the Celts defend themselves against the Picts / Pictish (northern Scots).  The Celts also sought aid from the regions of Ald Seaxum (Saxony) and Iotum (Jute). These tribes— the Angles, Saxons and Jutes — lived on the coast of West Germany and Denmark.

 What would become Anglo-Saxon English (Old English /OE) came because the Saxons settled in the south of Britain and the Angles in the north and east.  These Germanic immigrant tribes formed the Anglo-Saxon society and over time their languages coalesced into Old English (0E).  Old English was spoken between the 5th and 11th centuries and began to appear in writing during the early 8th century.  (The Celts eventually were forced to settle in the highland regions of Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.)

Speakers of Old English called their language Englisc, they were Angle(s), Angelcynn or Angelfolc and their home was Angelcynn or Englaland (land of the Angles). Some of their words e.g. I, me, you, tall, short, food, water, wood, stone, work, earth, be, hound, overweening, betwixt, fortnight "feowertyne niht" etc. formed the core of English. ...

The Anglo-Saxons were finally conquered by the Normans from Northern France in 1066. The Normans made major changes to the vocabulary and the spelling and so ended the Anglo-Saxon history of England.