Foreign language influences in English Foreign language influences in English The core of English language descends from Old English, the language brought with the Angles, Saxon, and Jutish settlers to what was to be called England in and after the 500s. The bulk of the language in spoken and written texts is from this source. As a statistical rule, around 70 percent of words in any text are Anglo-Saxon. Moreover, the grammar is largely Anglo-Saxon. A significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources. Estimates of native words (derived from Old English) range from 20%–33%, with the rest made up of
Germanic peoples which further separated into Icelanders, Faroese and Norwegians on one hand and Swedes and Danes on the other. In Scandinavia, there is a long history of assimilation of and by the Sami people and Finnic peoples, namely Finns and Karelians. In today's usage, the term "Nordic peoples" refers to the ethnic groups in all of the Nordic countries. In Great Britain, Germanic people coalesced into the Anglo-Saxon (or English) people between the 8th and 10th centuries. The various Germanic peoples of the Migrations period eventually spread out over a vast expanse stretching from contemporary European Russia to Iceland and from