Old English Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, as the language of the upper classes by Anglo-Norman, a relative of French. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, as during this period the English language
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