If you look at the map of the Roman Empire, you could be forgiven for thinking that this invasion lead to a dilution of the then Celtic English, especially as the Roman empire did not include Scotland and Ireland, where Celtic still survives.

No doubt there was some absorption of Latin, but it was Germanic that pushed out Celtic, creating the “Old English” of Shakespeare’s time.

The big event that lead to the modern English mix of Germanic and Romance was the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the only date that I remember from my history classes. The French Normans conquered England and brought with them the French language.

Gradually, French became the language of the aristocracy and Old English remained as that of the lower classes.

Having said that, French is one of the four main Romance languages, “Romance” coming from “Roman” or Latin. What happened was Latin morphed into Italian which then spread to Spain, Portugal and France. I’m currently learning Italian and am fairly familiar with French. I’ve been surprised to find that the two languages are only loosely similar, but understand that Spanish and Italian are very close. So, I guess the languages followed more or less the arrows below.

I find more similarities between English and French than between Italian and French.

And although Portuguese and Spanish are very similar, the difference is in the pronunciation. Portuguese words sound very different to Spanish and Italian.

Next week we’ll look at the end result.