English is a language 【小题1】(bring) to Britain in the 5th century by Anglo-Saxon settlers from various parts of Northwest Germany. It is convenient to divide English into three periods roughly─Old English, Middle English, and Modern English.

The 【小题2】(early) form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Old English developed from a set of North Sea Germanic dialects 【小题3】(origin) spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland, and Southern Sweden by Germanic tribes known 【小题4】 the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Later, Old English was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the northwest. The most famous work from the Old English period is the epic poem Beowulf, written by 【小题5】 unknown poet. Old English is very different from Modern English and difficult for the 21st-century English speakers to understand.

For the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and the nobility spoke only a 【小题6】(vary) of French called Anglo-Norman. English continued to be the language of the common people. The Norman influence 【小题7】(strong) the continual evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in 【小题8】 is now referred to as Middle English. And one of the best-known works from the Middle English period is Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

From the late 15th century, the language changed into Early Modern English, often dated from the Great Vowel Shift. English is continuously absorbing foreign words, especially Latin and Greek, causing English to have the largest vocabulary of any language in the world. By the late 18th century, the British Empire had sped the spread of English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art and formal education all contributed to English 【小题9】 (become) the first truly global language. As there are many words from different languages, the risk of mispronunciation is high. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his A Dictionary of the English Language, 【小题10】 introduced a standard set of spelling conventions and usage norms.