Influence of French on English England, kept their Norman mother tongue, while the more modest rural and urban strata continued to speak English. Norman was a particular variety of the Gallo-Roman language, spoken in Normandy. It was one of the Oil languages alongside, among others, the Picard and the Walloon. The Norman language was modified in contact with the Anglo-Saxon language. It then integrated words and phrases from English and give birth to a dialect, Anglo-Norman, still spoken on the Anglo-Norman isles. Anglo-Norman can be described as a vernacular language, on English soil in the 11th century, in the field of literature, culture, court and
Anglo-Norman language the upper class. There is evidence, too, that foreign words (Latin, Greek, Italian, Arabic, Spanish) often entered English via Anglo-Norman. The language of later documents adopted some of the changes ongoing in continental French and lost many of its original dialectal characteristics, so "Anglo-French" remained (in at least some respects and at least at some social levels) part of the dialect continuum of modern French, often with distinctive spellings. Over time, the use of Anglo-French expanded into the fields of law, administration, commerce, and science, in all of which a rich documentary legacy survives, indicative of the vitality and importance