Old English an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon.
It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.
Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years– from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the 5th century to some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066 when the language underwent a dramatic transition.
The most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar, which it shared with its related languages in continental Europe. Some of these features are shared with the other West Germanic languages with which Old English is grouped, while some other features are traceable to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to derive.
Like other Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental, which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects (but only in the personal pronouns) in addition to the usual singular and plural forms.
