Old English

Old English (Englisċ or Ænglisc) or Anglo-Saxon,^[1] was spoken in Anglo-Saxon England from 450 AD to 1100 AD. It was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, who came to Great Britain from what are now Germany and Denmark. Different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms spoke different dialects, but a western dialect became the main literary version. Both modern languages of England and Scotland (English and Scots) came from the language of the Anglo-Saxons.

Old English
Anglo-Saxon
Ænglisċ, Englisċ, Anglisc
A detail of the first page of the Beowulf manuscript, showing the words "ofer hron rade", translated as "over the whale's road (sea)". It is an example of an Old English stylistic device, the kenning.
Pronunciation	[ˈeŋɡliʃ]
Region	England (except the extreme south-west and north-west), southern and eastern Scotland, and the eastern fringes of modern Wales.
Ethnicity	Anglo Saxons
Era	mostly developed into Middle English and Early Scots by the 13th century
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Ingvaeonic Anglo-Frisian Anglic Old English
Dialects	Kentish Mercian Northumbrian West Saxon
Writing system	Runic, later Latin (Old English alphabet).
Language codes
ISO 639-2	ang
ISO 639-3	ang
ISO 639-6	ango
Glottolog	olde1238
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Old English is a West Germanic language and developed out of Ingvaeonic, which is very different from Modern English because it is closer to German than to English and has for its closest relatives Old Frisian and Old Saxon. It has many more Germanic words, difficult grammar and complex inflections.

In early centuries, Old English was rarely written down, and even then, it was in runes. After the 8th century, the Latin alphabet was used more often by churchmen like the Venerable Bede. After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, Old English was replaced by Anglo-Norman, which gradually turned into Middle English

Beowulf is written in Old English in an alphabetic script.

Old English comparison

Languages	wordlist
English	apple	path	eat	tide	make	child	give	day
Old English	æppel	pæþ	etan	tid	macian	cild	giefan	dæg
German	Apfel	Pfad	essen	Zeit	machen	Kind	geben	Tag