As its name suggests, the English language, today spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world, originated as the language of England, where it remains the principal tongue spoken by 98% of the population. It is an Indo-European language in the Anglo-Frisian branch of the Germanic family. After the Norman conquest, the Old English language, brought to Britain by the Anglo-Saxon settlers, was confined to the lower social classes as Norman French and Latin were used by the aristocracy.