English language and sometimes also vocabulary, grammar and spelling—English-speakers from around the world are able to communicate with one another with relative ease. English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, whose languages gradually evolved into the Anglic languages on the British Isles, and into the Frisian languages and Low German/Low Saxon on the continent. The Frisian languages, together with which the Anglic languages form the Anglo-Frisian languages, are the closest living relatives of English. Low German/Low Saxon
Anglo-Saxons largely North Germanic unit, from which the emperor's bodyguard was drawn and continued to serve the empire until the early 15th century. However, the population of England at home remained largely Anglo-Saxon; for them, little changed immediately except that their Anglo-Saxon lord was replaced by a Norman lord. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis (1075 – c. 1142), himself the product of an Anglo-Norman marriage, wrote: "And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed". The inhabitants of the North and Scotland never