Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language.

This is episode 40, Learning Latin and Latin Learning.

In this episode, we're going to explore the first significant foreign influence on the

English language.

With the rise of the church and monastic schools, more and more people in Britain were speaking

Latin.

And as a result, Latin words began to infiltrate English.

And this process was well underway over three centuries before the Normans arrived with

their horde of Latin derived words.

So in this episode, we'll explore this first period of Latin influence on English.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is history of

Englishpodcast.com, and you can always reach me directly at Kevin at historyofenglishpodcast.com

and I'm on Twitter at EnglishHistPod.

So let's turn to English's first flirtation with Latin.

As we know, Latin had once been a prominent language in Britain during the period of Roman

rule.

But after the Anglo-Saxons arrived, English had displaced the other languages which had

been spoken before, including Latin and the native Celtic languages.

Over the next century or so, Latin largely fell out of use in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

With the decline of Roman civilization much of Britain not only lost the language of Rome,

it also lost Rome's formal education system.

...