English language in Europe following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Anglo-Norman language was the language of administration and few Kings of England spoke English. A large number of French words were assimilated into Old English, which lost most of its inflections, the result being Middle English. Around the year 1500, the Great Vowel Shift marked the transformation of Middle English into Modern English. The most famous surviving work from Old English is "Beowulf", and from Middle English is Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales". The rise of Modern English began around the fifteenth century, with Early Modern English reaching its literary pinnacle at the
Germanic parent language Germanic parent language In historical linguistics, the Germanic parent language (GPL) includes the reconstructed languages in the Germanic group referred to as Pre-Germanic Indo-European (PreGmc), Early Proto-Germanic (EPGmc), and Late Proto-Germanic (LPGmc), spoken in the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. The less precise term "Germanic", that appears in etymologies, dictionaries, etc., loosely refers to a language spoken in the 1st millennium AD, proposedly at that time developing into the group of Germanic languages—a stricter term for that same proposition, but with an alternative chronography, is "Proto-Germanic language". As an identifiable neologism, "Germanic parent language" appears to have been first used