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700
Beowulf's Writing
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1066
The Norman Invasion
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1100
Old English
Old Norse text such as Thor, Loki, etc. -
1100
Old English
The Vikings/Scandinavians were some of the first people to introduce pronouns, modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like "hence" and "together"), conjunctions and prepositions. -
1100
Old English
Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that derived from the dialects of the same regions in the Anglo-Saxon period. -
1200
Early Middle English
Gradually, the wealthy and the government Anglicised again, although Norman (and subsequently French) remained the dominant language of literature until the 14th century. -
1200
Early Middle English
Although Norse- and English-speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology, the Norse-speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings. -
1200
Early Middle English
Peterborough Chronicle -
1440
The invention of the Printing Press
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1476
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
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1492
The Discovery of North America
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1500
Modern English
Modern English evolved from Early Modern English which was used from the beginning of the Tudor period until the Interregnum and Restoration in England. -
Shakespeare's First Folio
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Modern English
The works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern English. -
The American Revolution
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Modern English
According to the Ethnologue, there are almost 1 billion speakers of English as a first or second language.