THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. This 

broad family includes most of the European languages spoken today. The 

Indo-European family includesseveral major branches:

• Latin and the modern Romance languages;
• The Germanic languages;
• The Indo-Iranian languages, including Hindi and Sanskrit;
• The Slavic languages;
• The Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian (but not Estonian);
• The Celtic languages; and
• Greek.

The influence of the original Indo-European language, designated 

proto-Indo-European, can be seen today, even though no written record 

of it exists. The word for father, for example, is vater in German, pater in 

Latin, and pitr in Sanskrit. These words are all cognates, similar words in 

different languages that share the same root.

English is in the Germanic group of languages. This group began as a common language in the Elbe river region about 3,000 years ago. Around the second century BC, this Common Germanic language split into three distinct sub-group

• East Germanic: was spoken by peoples who migrated back to southeastern Europe. No East Germanic language is spoken today, and the only written East Germanic language that survives is Gothic. 
• North Germanic: evolved into the modern Scandinavian languages of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic (but not Finnish, which is related to Estonian and is not an Indo-European language).
• West Germanic is the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.