The history of the English language is usually told in four periods: Old English, from the Anglo-Saxon settlements to about 1150; Middle English, to about 1500; Early Modern English, to about 1700; and Modern English since. The Oxford English Dictionary's Philip Durkin calls the date that divides Old from Middle English "very arbitrary" (Durkin, n.d.-b).
EdCitation publishes this history, built from the OED's history of English pages, the British Library's timeline of English (in archived copies, while the British Library's site recovers from a cyber-attack), university linguistics pages and published histories, all read in September 2026. Where the sources disagree or are unsure, so are we.
A student writing about it needs sources: EdCitation's free Find sources searches the scholarship, Cite a source builds each reference from the publisher's record, and Verify references confirms each one exists, as the last section shows.
What are the four periods of English?
Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. The table gives each period's rough dates as the sources state them, one documented line and a gloss.
| Period | Rough dates | A line from the period | In today's English |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old English | Early fifth century, after Roman rule, to about 1150 | "Hwæt, wē Gār-Dena in gēardagum" (Beowulf, line 1) | Lo, we [have heard] of the Spear-Danes in days of old |
| Middle English | 1150 to 1500 in the OED's dating | "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote" (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales) | When April with its sweet showers |
| Early Modern English | The late fifteenth century to about 1700 | "An eie for an eie, and a tooth for a tooth" (King James Bible, 1611) | An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth |
| Modern English | From about 1700 | "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge" (Johnson's definition of lexicographer, 1755) | The same words today |
Where each line comes from
Beowulf survives in one manuscript of about 1000, though the poem is probably from the seventh or eighth century; Slocum and Lehmann (n.d.) print the line from Klaeber's 1950 edition. Chaucer began the Tales in 1387 and was still at work on them at his death in 1400 (British Library, n.d.-d). The King James line is Matthew 5:38 as printed in 1611; about 250 phrases from that Bible are still in use (British Library, n.d.-f). The British Library shows Johnson's definition in its copy of the 1755 edition (British Library, n.d.-e).
Why the dates are rough
Nobody can say when Old English began: its earliest long sources in copies of their own time are Latin-English glossaries from around 700, one glossing Latin anser as "goos" (Durkin, n.d.-b). Later lines differ too. The OED's third edition sets Middle English at 1150 to 1500 (Durkin, n.d.-a); Weiner (n.d.-a) starts Early Modern English towards the end of the fifteenth century and matches it to the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, 1485 to 1714.
Which languages shaped English?
The Germanic speech of the Anglo-Saxon settlers is the core, and most of the words used most often today go back to it (Durkin, n.d.-b). Latin, Old Norse and French each added a layer, and Latin did so twice.
The settlers, and Latin through the Church
Before the Anglo-Saxons came, most of Britain spoke Celtic languages, yet English took very few Celtic words. Its early Latin words, such as butter, chalk, mile, school and wine, were borrowed on the continent before the settlements or after the conversion to Christianity, which began in the late sixth century and brought long texts in the Roman alphabet. Old English also had letters since lost: þ and ð for th, and æ (Durkin, n.d.-b).
Old Norse
Viking raids began in the late eighth century, and Scandinavian settlers followed in the east and north of England. Old English texts up to about 1100 hold only about 100 Scandinavian loanwords, but early Middle English texts from the settled areas are full of them; one poem, the Ormulum, has die, law, skin, take, want and wrong. Even pronouns came across, which is rare: they, them and their, though early Chaucer manuscripts still have hem and her. Durkin (n.d.-a) puts the Scandinavian share of Middle English vocabulary at perhaps 2 or 3 per cent, a figure Durkin says needs caution.
Norman French
After 1066 the ruling elite in church and state spoke French, and English was pushed out of writing almost entirely. It came back in the late fourteenth century with Chaucer, Gower and Langland. By 1500 more than 40 per cent of all the words English has ever borrowed from French had appeared; peace, from Anglo-Norman pais, is one (Durkin, n.d.-a).
Latin and Greek in the Renaissance
Latin's biggest wave came later: by 1500, fewer than 20 per cent of the Latin borrowings in modern English had arrived (Durkin, n.d.-a). The new words started a quarrel. In 1553 Thomas Wilson warned against "straunge ynkehorne termes", and in 1578 John Florio complained that English took words from Latin, French, Italian and others, "some also from the Greeke". The quarrel faded after about 1600, partly because so many Latin words had been accepted (Weiner, n.d.-a).
What did printing do to English?
It fixed the spelling of the late Middle Ages just as the sounds were changing. William Caxton brought printing to England in 1476 (Weiner, n.d.-a), and the printers used the London English that already served as a kind of standard in manuscripts (Weiner, n.d.-b). Before that, variety ruled: one atlas of late medieval English records around 500 spellings of through (Durkin, n.d.-a).
Caxton knew the problem. In the prologue to his Eneydos (1490) a merchant asks a woman in the south for "eggys" and is told she speaks no French; only when another traveller asks for "eyren" does she understand. Egges came from Old Norse and eyren from Old English, and Caxton chose London usage over his own Kentish, which he thought "broad and rude" (British Library, n.d.-c). English, he wrote, "varyeth ferre" from the language spoken "whan I was borne" (Weiner, n.d.-a).
The k of knight and the gh of night later fell silent, but the letters stayed, and by the mid-seventeenth century printed spelling was nearly today's; handwriting varied well into the eighteenth (Weiner, n.d.-b).
What was the Great Vowel Shift?
The Great Vowel Shift was a change between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in which the long vowels of English moved up in the mouth (Menzer, 2000). Weiner (n.d.-b) illustrates it, "with much simplification", with mite, meet and mate, whose Middle English vowels sounded roughly as in thief, fete and palm. Long i became a diphthong, long e took its place, and long a moved towards the vowel of air; the back vowels of mouth and moot changed in parallel. The spelling stayed, which is why English vowel letters no longer match their values in other European languages.
What linguists still dispute
Most of it, says Krug (2017): consensus is limited, the Shift is "well known only in the sense that it is widely known", and some of the disputes are about definitions rather than facts. Lass (1992), in a chapter titled "What, if anything, was the Great Vowel Shift?", recalls an old argument: whether the change began with the highest vowels becoming diphthongs or with the middle vowels rising. Menzer (2000) adds that no step happened overnight: old and young speakers, and different regions, said one word differently at the same time.
Who decided what correct English was?
No academy did; dictionaries and critics did. From about 1660 John Dryden, and later Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, backed proposals for an academy like the Académie Française, and Weiner (n.d.-a) dates the habit of criticising supposed grammatical errors to Dryden's 1672 criticism of Ben Jonson for, among other things, ending a sentence with a preposition.
Cawdrey, 1604
The first single-language English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explained about 3,000 hard words. Its preface criticises travellers who "pouder their talke with over-sea language" (British Library, n.d.-b).
Samuel Johnson, 1755
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language took just over eight years and six helpers, listed 40,000 words and quoted more than 114,000 passages. The London booksellers who commissioned it hoped it would steady the language (British Library, n.d.-a). It was the first single-language English dictionary to support its definitions with quotations, and the first OED took nearly 3,000 quotations and at least 723 definitions from it (Brewer, 2025).
Johnson found English "copious without order", yet his preface doubts that any language can be fixed: "to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind" are undertakings of pride, and he hoped "English liberty" would stop anyone founding an academy (Johnson, 1755/n.d.).
The Oxford English Dictionary
The OED began in 1857 as a proposal to the Philological Society for a dictionary built on evidence of words in use, gathered by volunteer readers. Oxford University Press took it on in 1879, with James Murray as editor. The first part, A to ant, appeared in 1884 and the last in April 1928: ten volumes, over 250,000 main entries and almost 2 million quotations. Online since 2000, it now defines more than 500,000 words (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.).
How many people speak English now?
About 1.5 billion. Ethnologue's free summary, which cites its 29th edition (Eberhard et al., 2026), charts English in 2025 at 1,528 million speakers, 390 million of them native: the largest language counting every speaker, third by native speakers after Mandarin and Spanish, and spoken in 188 countries. By those figures, about three speakers in four learned English as another language.
The English Effect (British Council, 2013) estimated that "some 1.75 billion" people spoke English at a useful level, one in four people on Earth, and forecast two billion using or learning it by 2020. We could not confirm whether that happened, and the two counts are not a trend: they are twelve years apart and measure different things. We read only Ethnologue's free charts.
How do you research and cite the history of English?
With sources you can open and references built from their records. EdCitation is the best tool for the references: each is taken from the publisher's record and none is ever composed, an assurance no chatbot can give. This history shows why that matters: Johnson and the OED defined words from quotations their makers had read, and a reference list deserves the same.
- Find the scholarship. EdCitation's free Find sources searches about 300 million published works, by topic or by the claim you need to support, with filters for kind of source, years and open access. On 24 September 2026, "great vowel shift", sorted by citations, returned 430,149 results, Lass's 1992 chapter first.
- Gather the books. EdCitation's Library searches a catalogue of textbooks and scholarly books by discipline, kind, language and year, finds a copy in a library near you, and keeps your choices in My Books with a free account; reading or borrowing from more than 5 million books is part of Max, $24 a month or $216 a year (pricing).
- Build each reference from its DOI or ISBN in Cite a source, free, in any of six styles (APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver), with a retraction screen.
- Correct what the record got wrong, as below, and cite old texts from the edition you read: Chaucer and Beowulf reach you through an editor (history books for students).
- Check the finished list in Verify references, free, which marks every entry verified, "check this" or not found and flags retracted papers.
Two runs, quoted as they came back
From the DOI of Krug's chapter, Cite a source returned, from Crossref, in a rerun on 27 September 2026:
Krug, M. (2017). Chapter 14: The Great Vowel Shift. In A. Bergs & L. Brinton (Eds.), Early Modern English (pp. 241–266). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110525069-014
The titles came back in sentence case, as APA asks, with the Great Vowel Shift and Early Modern English keeping their capitals as names. "Chapter 14:" is a label, not the title, and the record omits the multivolume work: De Gruyter's page makes the book volume 4 of The History of English, edited by Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton. The corrected entry is under References.
From the ISBN of Philip Durkin's Borrowed Words, 9780199574995, it returned, from a library catalogue's record:
Durkin, P. (2014). Borrowed words: A history of loanwords in English. Oxford University Press.
That entry stands. APA capitalises the first word of a subtitle (American Psychological Association, 2022), and so did Cite a source, though the catalogue writes "a history"; sentence case itself dates from 1929 (the history of APA Style).
What Verify references said
Given five entries from this guide's research, Verify references marked Durkin, Krug and Lass verified. The British Council report first came back unchecked, "The library catalogue did not answer in time", and verified on a second try: a check that could not run was not called not found.
Johnson's 1755 Dictionary came back "check this": "A work with this title is recorded in The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol 18 (2005), not in the source your entry names." The nearest record was a 2005 chapter of that name in Yale's edition of Johnson's works, not the 1755 book. For a book older than DOIs, confirm the printing in a library catalogue (how to check a reference is real). None of these tools writes any part of a paper.
Quick questions
Did Shakespeare write in Early Modern English?
Yes. Shakespeare's plays and the 1611 King James Bible belong to Early Modern English, which the OED's Edmund Weiner matches to the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, 1485 to 1714.
Where do the words they, them and their come from?
From Old Norse, which the OED calls early Scandinavian. Borrowed pronouns are rare, and Chaucer's early manuscripts still used hem and her for "them" and "their".
How many people speak English?
Ethnologue's 2025 chart gives 1,528 million speakers in all, 390 million of them native. The British Council's 2013 estimate was about 1.75 billion speaking it at a useful level.
Can EdCitation build a reference for a history of English book?
Yes. EdCitation's free Cite a source builds it from a DOI or an ISBN in six styles; check the subtitle's capital and any series or volume the record left out.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2022, July). Sentence case capitalization. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/capitalization/sentence-case
- Brewer, C. (2025, August 6). Johnson's dictionary (1755). Examining the OED. https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/historical-background/johnson/index.html
- British Council. (2013). The English effect: The impact of English, what it's worth to the UK and why it matters to the world. https://www.britishcouncil.org/research-insight/english-effect
- British Library. (n.d.-a). 1755 – Johnson's dictionary. Archived May 30, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200530145046/https://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/johnson/1755johnsonsdictionary.html
- British Library. (n.d.-b). Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall [English timeline]. Archived October 24, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201024183302/http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126647.html
- British Library. (n.d.-c). Caxton's 'egges' story [English timeline]. Archived November 9, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201109004137/http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126611.html
- British Library. (n.d.-d). Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales [English timeline]. Archived July 17, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200717183548/http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126565.html
- British Library. (n.d.-e). Johnson's dictionary: A harmless drudge. Archived February 19, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200219212323/https://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/johnson/drudge/drudge.html
- British Library. (n.d.-f). King James Bible [English timeline]. Archived February 17, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200217042150/http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126646.html
- Durkin, P. (n.d.-a). Middle English – an overview. Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/discover/middle-english-an-overview/
- Durkin, P. (n.d.-b). Old English – an overview. Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/discover/old-english-an-overview/
- Durkin, P. (2014). Borrowed words: A history of loanwords in English. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574995.001.0001
- Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Robinson, A. J. (Eds.). (2026). What is the most spoken language? Ethnologue: Languages of the world (29th ed.). SIL Global. https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/most-spoken-language/
- Johnson, S. (n.d.). Preface to A dictionary of the English language (J. Lynch, Ed.). (Original work published 1755) https://jacklynch.net/Texts/preface.html
- Krug, M. (2017). The Great Vowel Shift. In A. Bergs & L. J. Brinton (Eds.), The history of English: Vol. 4. Early Modern English (pp. 241–266). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110525069-014
- Lass, R. (1992). What, if anything, was the Great Vowel Shift? In M. Rissanen, O. Ihalainen, T. Nevalainen, & I. Taavitsainen (Eds.), History of Englishes (pp. 144–155). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110877007.144
- Menzer, M. J. (2000). What is the Great Vowel Shift? The Great Vowel Shift. Furman University. http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm
- Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.). History of the OED. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed/history-of-the-oed/
- Slocum, J., & Lehmann, W. P. (n.d.). Beowulf: Prologue (Old English Online, Lesson 1). Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/engol/10
- Weiner, E. (n.d.-a). Early Modern English – an overview. Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/discover/early-modern-english-an-overview/
- Weiner, E. (n.d.-b). Early modern English: Grammar, pronunciation, and spelling. Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/discover/early-modern-english-spelling-grammar-and-pronunciation/