English grammar has also changed, becoming simpler and less Germanic. The next article in a series of articles on the English language and British and American culture. Those countries have millions of native speakers of continuous dialect ranging from an English-based Creole to a more standard version of English. These changes were further consolidated through Shakespeare and other emerging playwrights who found that their ideas could not be expressed through the English language currently in circulation.
For thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the flexed variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, to invariable forms, such as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The second phase, Middle English, is so called because Anglo-Saxon rules are systematically broken down and compromised by the various influences of the Viking invasions, the Norman conquest (106) and, of course, Latin, which was the language of the church. The opening of vocabulary involves both the free admission of words from other languages and the rapid creation of compounds and derivatives. Like Icelandic and Faroese, the development of English in the British Isles isolated it from mainland Germanic languages and influences, and has since diverged considerably.
Through the use of these complex sentence constructions with informatively empty topics, English is able to maintain both a sentence structure by topic and a commentary and SVO syntax. It is marked by the “Great Change of Vowels”, which, supported by the invention of the printing press and the growing technology for generalized communication (on paper and later, by radio) led to a lengthening and settling of vowel sounds and a standardization of spoken language. Dialectologists identify many dialects of English, which usually refer to regional varieties that differ from each other in terms of grammar patterns, vocabulary and pronunciation. In County Wexford, around Dublin, two extinct dialects known as Forth and Bargy and Fingallian developed as early Middle English offspring, and were spoken until the 19th century.
By the 12th century, Middle English was fully developed, integrating Nordic and French characteristics; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early modern English, around 1500. Perhaps one of the significant influences of Old Norse on English was on the syntax and grammatical order of words. Just as the Vikings colonized Great Britain, even the patrons of English grammar have much to thank the North Germanic languages, such as Danish or Icelandic. Tristan da Cunha is part of a British overseas territory, and its nearly 300 residents speak only English.
