British English English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These
Dutch language of the local Germanic populace as opposed to Latin, the non-native language of writing and the Catholic Church. In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, "theodisce" refers to Anglo-Saxon, the West Germanic dialects of Britain. Owing to commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries between England and the Low Countries, a cognate of "theodisk" (most likely Middle Dutch "Duutsc") was borrowed into English and developed into the exonym "Dutch", which came to refer exclusively to the people of the Netherlands. (A usage of the English term "Dutch" that includes German survives in