英语语言的历史发展可以分为三个阶段，分别是：古英语（Old English），中世纪英语（Middle English）和现代英语（Modern English）。
古英语（449--1100）。有记载的英语语言起始于449年，当时包括央格鲁－撒克逊人（Angles-Saxons）在内的德国部落入侵大不列颠。他们把原来的居民凯尔特人（the Celts）赶到不列颠的北部和西部角落。凯尔特人的领袖King Arthur带领部队勇敢作战，英勇抗击德国入侵者。这之后在不列颠岛上央格鲁人、撒克逊人和一些德国部落都说着各自的英语。尽管85％的古英语词汇现在已经不再使用，但一些常用词汇如：child, foot, house, man, sun等等还是保留下来。和现代英语相比，古英语中的外来词很少，但派生词缀较多。古英语中还有较多描述性的复合词。如“音乐”是earsport；“世界”是age of man。在著名的英雄史诗《贝奥武甫》（Beowulf）中对此有详尽描述。
787年，来自丹麦及斯堪的纳维亚地区的北欧海盗（the Vikings）陆续进入英国。在之后的三百年里，他们袭击、侵占了大部分的英格兰。北欧海盗对英语语言的影响意义是深远的，是他们带来了代词they、their、them等；/g/ /k/的发音；甚至包括husband、window这样的词。古英语无论从发音还是拼写上都与现代英语大相径庭。
中世纪英语（1100――1500）。1066年的诺曼底征服事件在英语语言发展史上是一个标志性的转折点。在这年，威廉带领军队从法国诺曼底省出发，穿过英吉利海峡，想在英国称王并在伦敦成立一个法国法
庭。之后的近三百年里，法语一直是英国的官方语言，成为统治阶级用语，而平民百姓说的英语被认为市低等语言。到1300年左右，法语的使用开始减少。到14世纪末期，英语又重新成为官方语言。乔叟写于14世纪末期的《坎特伯雷故事集》（Canterbury Tales）反映了政治、经济、社会等方面的变化对英语语言的影响。
在近四百年时间里，诺曼人给英语带来了近一万的外来词，深深影响了英国人的社会和生活。英语语言在这一时期借用了较多法语中的派生词缀，如-able, -ess。当然也有一些拉丁语直接进入英语，而且多用于书面语。由于贸易的发展，还有少量的荷兰词语在这时期融入英语中。
中世纪英语的语音变化较少，但句法上已经形成了固定的词序，并且扩展了情态动词、助词结构。不规则动词越来越少，很多不规则动词的过去式和过去分词也趋向规则化。到1000年，语言使用中已确定了-s作为名词复数的构成，而古英语中曾以-en结尾表示复数便渐渐不再被人们使用。
现代英语（1500――至今）。1476年，卡克斯顿（William Caxton）在英国开始引进印刷机
的使用，标志着中世纪英语转入现代英语阶段。由于读物数量的增多，范围扩大，词汇拼写开始趋向规范化，标准化，固定化。这样一来，读音和拼写之间的差距扩大。另外，随着探险、殖民、以及贸易等各方面走向世界化，给现代英语带来一定的冲击。超过50种语言的外来词涌入英语，如阿拉伯语，法语，德语，荷兰语，俄语，希伯来语，西班牙语，汉语，意大利语等。
为体现英语语言的威望，文艺复兴时期（Renaissance）有更多的拉丁和希腊词汇加入英语，象congratulate, democracy, education等来自拉丁语；catastrophe, encyclopedia, thermometer 来自希腊语。一些现代希腊语、拉丁语中的科技用语如aspirin, vaccinate也被当作英语使用。另外，一些外来语（如criterion, focus）仍保留了原来词语的复数形式。还有一些更保留了当时的拼写和发音。
English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. This broad family includes most of the European languages spoken today. The Indo-European family includes several major branches: Latin and the modern Romance languages (French etc.); the Germanic languages (English, German, Swedish etc.); the Indo-Iranian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit etc.); the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech etc.); the Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish Gaelic etc.); Greek.
The influence of the original Indo-European language can be seen today, even though no written record of it exists. The word for father, for example, is vater in German, pater in Latin, and pitr in Sanskrit. These words are all cognates, similar words in different languages that share the same root.
By the second century BC, this Common Germanic language had split into three distinct sub-groups:
East Germanic was spoken by peoples who migrated back to southeastern Europe. No East Germanic language is spoken today, and the only written East Germanic language that survives is Gothic.
North Germanic evolved into the modern Scandinavian languages of Swedish, Danish,  Norwegian, and Icelandic (but not Finnish, which is related to Hungarian and Estonian and is not an Indo-European language).
West Germanic is the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.
Old English (500-1100 AD)
todayWest Germanic invaders from Jutland and southern Denmark: the Angles (whose name is the source of the words England and English), Saxons, and Jutes, began to settle in the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. They spoke a mutually intelligible language, similar to modern Frisian - the language of the northeastern region of the Netherlands - that is called Old English. Four major dialects of Old English emerged, Northumbrian in the north of England, Mercian in the Midlands, West Saxon in the south and west, and Kentish in the Southeast.
These invader
s pushed the original, Celtic-speaking inhabitants out of what is now England into Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland, leaving behind a few Celtic words. These Celtic languages survive today in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland and in Welsh. Cornish, unfortunately, is, in linguistic terms, now a dead language. (The last native Cornish speaker died in 1777) Also influencing English at this time were the Vikings. Norse invasions and settlement, beginning around 850, brought many North Germanic words into the language, particularly in the north of England. Some examples are dream, which had meant 'joy' until the Vikings imparted its current meaning on it from the Scandinavian cognate draumr, and skirt, which continues to live alongside its native English cognate shirt.
The majority of words in modern English come from foreign, not Old English roots. In fact, only about one sixth of the known Old English words have descendants surviving today. But this is deceptive; Old English is much more important than these statistics would indicate. About half of the most commonly used words in modern English have Old English roots. Words like be, water, and strong, for example, derive from Old English roots.
Old English, whose best known surviving example is the poem Beowulf, lasted until about 1100. Shortly after the most important event in the development and history of the English language, the N
orman Conquest.
The Norman Conquest and Middle English (1100-1500)
William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 AD. The new overlords spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman. The Normans were also of Germanic stock ("Norman" comes from "Norseman") and Anglo-Norman was a French dialect that had considerable Germanic influences in addition to the basic Latin roots.
Prior to the Norman Conquest, Latin had been only a minor influence on the English language, mainly through vestiges of the Roman occupation and from the conversion of Britain to Christianity in the seventh century (ecclesiastical terms such as priest, vicar, and mass came into the language this way), but now there was a wholesale infusion of Romance (Anglo-Norman) words.
The influence of the Normans can be illustrated by looking at two words, beef and cow. Beef, commonly eaten by the aristocracy, derives from the Anglo-Norman, while the Anglo-Saxon commoners, who tended the cattle, retained the Germanic cow. Many legal terms, such as indict, jury , and verdict have Anglo-Norman roots because the Normans ran the courts. This split, where words commonly used by the aristocracy have Romantic roots and words frequently used by the Ang
lo-Saxon commoners have Germanic roots, can be seen in many instances.
Sometimes French words replaced Old English words; crime replaced firen and uncle replaced eam. Other times, French and Old English components combined to form a new word, as the French gentle and the German
ic man formed gentleman. Other times, two different words with roughly the same meaning survive into modern English. Thus we have the Germanic doom and the French judgment, or wish and desire.
In 1204 AD, King John lost the province of Normandy to the King of France. This began a process where the Norman nobles of England became increasingly estranged from their French cousins. England became the chief concern of the nobility, rather than their estates in France, and consequently the nobility adopted a modified English as their native tongue. About 150 years later, the Black Death (1349-50) killed about one third of the English population. And as a result of this the labouring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance, and along with them English increased in importance compared to Anglo-Norman.
This mixture of the two languages came to be known as Middle English. The most famous example o
f Middle English is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Unlike Old English, Middle English can be read, albeit with difficulty, by modern English-speaking people.
By 1362, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over. In that year, the Statute of Pleading was adopted, which made English the language of the courts and it began to be used in Parliament.
The Middle English period came to a close around 1500 AD with the rise of Modern English.
Early Modern English (1500-1800)
The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance. The revival of classical scholarship brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the Language. These borrowings were deliberate and many bemoaned the adoption of these "inkhorn" terms, but many survive to this day. Shakespeare's character Holofernes in Loves Labor Lost is a satire of an overenthusiastic schoolmaster who is too fond of Latinisms.
Many students having difficulty understanding Shakespeare would be surprised to learn that he wrote in modern English. But, as can be seen in the earlier example of the Lord's Prayer, Elizabethan
English has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. Many familiar words and phrases were coined or first recorded by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words and countless idioms are his. Newcomers to Shakespeare are often shocked at the number of cliches contained in his plays, until they realize that he coined them and they became cliches afterwards. "One fell swoop," "vanish into thin air," and "flesh and blood" are all Shakespeare's. Words he bequeathed to the language include "critical," "leapfrog," "majestic," "dwindle," and "pedant."
Two other major factors influenced the language and served to separate Middle and Modern English. The first was the Great Vowel Shift. This was a change in pronunciation that began around 1400. While modern English speakers can read Chaucer with some difficulty, Chaucer's pronunciation would have been completely unintelligible to the modern ear. Shakes
peare, on the other hand, would be accented, but understandable. Vowel sounds began to be made further to the front of the mouth and the letter "e" at the end of words became silent. Chaucer's Lyf (pronounced "leef") became the modern life. In Middle English name was pronounced "nam-a," five was pronounced "feef," and down was pronounced "doon." In linguistic terms, the shift was rather sudden, the major changes occurring within a century. The shift is still not over, however, vowel soun
ds are still shortening although the change has become considerably more gradual.
The last major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press. William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. Books became cheaper and as a result, literacy became more common. Publishing for the masses became a profitable enterprise, and works in English, as opposed to Latin, became more common. Finally, the printing press brought standardization to English. The dialect of London, where most publishing houses were located, became the standard. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the first English dictionary was published in 1604.
Late-Modern English (1800-Present)
The principal distinction between early- and late-modern English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling are largely the same, but Late-Modern English has many more words. These words are the result of two historical factors. The first is the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the technological society. This necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed. The second was the British Empire. At its height, Britain ruled one quarter of the earth's surface, and English adopted many foreign words and made them its own.
The industrial and scientific revolutions created a need for neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries. For this, English relied heavily on Latin and Greek. Words like oxygen, protein, nuclear, and vaccine did not exist in the classical languages, but they were created from Latin and Greek roots. Such neologisms were not exclusively created from classical roots though, English roots were used for such terms as horsepower, airplane, and typewriter.
This burst of neologisms continues today, perhaps most visible in the field of electronics and computers. Byte, cyber-, bios, hard-drive, and microchip are good examples.
Also, the rise of the British Empire and the growth of global trade served not only to introduce English to the world, but to introduce words into English. Hindi, and the other languages of the Indian subcontinent, provided many words, such as pundit, shampoo, pajamas, and juggernaut. Virtually every language on Earth has contributed to the development of English, from Finnish (sauna) and Japanese (tycoon) to the vast contributions of French and Latin.
The British Empire was a maritime empire, and the influence of nautical terms on the English language has been great. Phras

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