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
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