Answer by Thomas E. Nunnally, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Auburn University

For me to answer it well, your question needs to be broken down into two questions:

1. Where did English come from in the first place?

2. How has it been influenced by other languages since then?

1.The origin of English: isolation of language speakers

Imagine a settlement of people a very long time ago where all the people spoke the same language. As they multiply over time, groups of them need more land to live on, so they pack up and move away. They settle in different areas, create their own societies, raise their families, and pass along their culture and language.

As these waves of settlers spread out and move farther and farther away, each group loses contact with the original settlement area and with the other groups of settlers.

All languages change over time, so what happened to that original language?

The language of each group of settlers changed in different ways so that after many generations the settlers from various groups would not even be able to understand each other. They wouldn’t even realize that their ancestors used to speak the same language! And each of these new language groups, in turn, would give rise to more different languages through the same process—move away, lose contact, and as language changes, create a new language different from all the others.

English comes from one such break-away language that split off long ago from that original early language. Its language group is called Germanic after the settlement group that moved to the area around Germany. Later, some groups of Germanic settlers moved to the island of England, and English came into being as a separate Germanic language. The very same thing is true of Russian, Italian, Irish, and Hindi to name just a few. Each of these languages developed from a different settlement group. They are all distant cousins of that first language, one that scholars call Indo-European. Other languages of the world, such as Chinese and Arabic, aren’t part of the same language family as English and Russian but have their own group of kinship languages.

2. The influence of language on language: contact of language speakers

But languages also change when they are influenced by the languages of other cultures. English has picked up thousands of words from other languages as speakers of English and other languages have dealt with one another—sometimes peacefully and sometimes not so peacefully.

For example, one thousand years ago some French-speaking armies conquered England. The rulers and officials who came to power in England after that spoke French, not English. That time in history has left a huge mark on the vocabulary of English, as many French words became common in English, including the words “peace,” “army,” “beef,” “question,” “music,” and “joy.”

But once the borrowing of words from other languages started, it has never stopped. English continues to be influenced by many languages, especially since it is spoken all over the world as a language of world trade and culture. Thus from Arabic have come the words “candy” and “zero,” and from India have come “pajamas” and “shampoo.” I’m sure you know many words that have entered English from our interest in eating new kinds of foods, from Spanish “burrito” to Japanese “sushi.” (Oh, and by the way, in Japanese “sushi” does NOT mean raw fish but the cold rice that the seafood is put on.)

Big, hardback dictionaries usually include the origin of each word, called its etymology, and it’s fun to find out where words come from. Some words, especially very basic ones like “father,” “meat,” and “foot,” go all the way back to the first stage of English, called Old English. But less common words are often borrowed from other languages. You can play a game of trying to guess where these food words came from and then look them up to find out if you guessed correctly.