After the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, William the Conqueror imposed Norman rule upon England

William was of Viking ancestry, but his forefathers had spent 150 years in Normandy, and their language was Vulgar Latin, the speech of the Roman soldiers and traders, corrupted into Norman French.

William wiped out the Saxon nobility, supplanting them with his own followers, whose names are recorded in his census, the Domesday Book.

The ascendancy of the French-speaking Normans over the English-speaking Saxons thrust two languages into opposition in the land.

The servants, adjusting themselves as best as they could, did not use many of the endings of the new Norman words; therefore, in the course of the next centuries, the fusing language lost many of its inflections (patterns of stress and intonation in a language).

For almost four hundred years, French was the language of the rulers, at the royal court; not until 1362 was English made the language of the law courts.

In church, and at Oxford University, one used either Latin or French. In these centuries, almost three-quarters of the Saxon words died; but enough remained to keep the basic form, the "feel" of the language, Saxon, while enriching it with the new host of Norman terms.

The many enforced mixtures, from Celtic times on, also made the language amenable to borrowing; while, the French, for example, even today resent the intrusion of foreign terms, and strive to keep their language "pure", free from "contamination" by what they scornfully call Franglais, English continuously welcomes new terms from other tongues, and even builds upon them.

As a result of such language borrowings, English has enriched itself with words from all around the world, more than any other tongue. It has the largest vocabulary of any other language and it is capable of an infinite variety of words.

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