The Development of Old English

But to continue with the movements of the Anglo-Saxons. As said in my first post, by the year 700 the Anglo-Saxons had inhabited the whole of England except Cornwall. England now became split into seven distinctive areas: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Wessex, Essex and Sussex. Each area would have spoken diferent dialects of Old English. Over the following centuries we see a gradual shift in the centres of power. In the seventh century Northumbria was very powerful and a great centre of learning. Power then moved southwards to Mercia, the centre of the seven kingdoms. By the ninth century power had shifted to Wessex, the most southerly. It was the kings of Wessex that eventually united the country, meaning that the Wessex dialect became the literary standard; most of our Old English scripts appear in this dialect. Although it is actually the Anglian dialect that is the ancestor of modern English. But other than dialect influences, many other movements affected the composition of modern English during this period of history, two of the most significant being the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to christianity and the Norman Invasion in the eleventh century. The christian conversion brought the influence of Latin, the language of the church, into the English language; it also importantly brought a writing system to Old English, other than previous rarely used runes. The Norman invasion then occurred in 1066, having a dramatic effect on the language; French even became the first language for a time. This is a brief history of early English and some of its first developments.