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-Saxon settlement of Britain signs of the Anglo-Saxon settlement, and the people, assumes that the words Angles, Saxons or Anglo-Saxon have the same meaning in all the sources. Assigning ethnic labels such as "Anglo-Saxon" is fraught with difficulties and the term itself only began to be used in the 8th century to distinguish "Germanic" groups in Britain from those on the continent (Old Saxony in present-day Northern Germany). The Chronica Gallica of 452 records for the year 441: "The British provinces, which to this time had suffered various defeats and misfortunes, are reduced to Saxon rule." The Chronicle was written some distance from Britain.