Latin influence in English

English has been called a Germanic language with a Romance vocabulary. Estimates of native words (derived from Old English) in English range from 20%–33%, with the rest made up of foreign borrowings. A large number of these borrowings are Latinate, coming directly from Latin, from Latin through one of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, or Spanish) or from some other language (such as Greek) into Latin and then into English.

Dark Ages

The Germanic tribes who would later give rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxon, Frisians, and Jutes) traded and fought with the Latin speaking Roman Empire. Many words (some originally from Greek) for common objects therefore entered the vocabulary of these Germanic people via Latin even before the tribes reached Britain: anchor, butter, camp, cheese, chest, cook, devil, dish, fork, gem, inch, kettle, kitchen, linen, mile, mill, mint (coin), noon, pillow, pin, pound, punt (boat), sack, street, wall, wine.

Christian missionaries coming to Britain in the 6th century and 7th century brought with them Latin religious terms which entered the English language: abbot, altar, apostle, bishop, church, clerk, disciple, mass, minister, monk, nun, pope, priest, school, shrive. As a result of the Latin influence on the Anglo-Frisian region, the two languages of English and Frisian share a common bond of containing a large number of Latin loanwords in their vocabularies that is much less prevalent in other Germanic languages, such as German and Dutch.

Middle Ages

The Norman Conquest of 1066 gave England a two tiered society with an aristocracy that spoke Anglo-Norman and a peasantry that spoke English. From 1066 until Henry IV of England ascended to the throne in 1399, the royal court of England spoke a Norman that became progressively Gallicised through contact with French. However, the Norman rulers made no attempt to suppress the English language, apart from not using it at all in their court. In 1204, the Anglo-Normans lost their continental territories in Normandy and became wholly English. By the time Middle English arises as the dominant language in the late 14th century, the Normans had contributed roughly 10,000 words to English, of which 75% remain in use. Continued use of Latin by the Church and centres of learning brought new Latin influence.

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