British English English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These
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