For many centuries, Germanic tribes, like the Goths and the Franks, had remained settled in Germanic lands. But several reasons suddenly caused them to relocate: the fall of the Roman Empire, which caused chaos and a ‘power vacuum’ in central Europe; the invasions of the Huns; and other reasons.
People from two tribes, the Angles and Saxons, settled on the island of Britain, and so the names of two Germanic tribes became, as historian Jan von Flocken explains, the names by which the English people are now identified:
Schließlich gibt es noch einen weiterwirkenden sprachlichen Überrest in Gestalt der Angeln und Sachsen, zweier Germanenstämme, die im Wesergebiet und in Schleswig siedelten, Mitte des 5. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. auf die Britische Insel auswanderten und dort eine eigenständige Kultur begründeten. Als «Anglo-Saxons» wurden so ausgerechnet Germanen bis heute zum Synonym für Engländer.
People now use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to identify Englishmen, or Englishmen’s descendants in North America, Australia, and other places. This term clearly identifies the English simply as displaced Germans.
Englishmen essentially were Germans, and the English language essentially was the German language, until 1066 A.D., when the invading Normans introduced a version of the French language, which added some new vocabulary to the Germanic core of the language.
Old English texts from around the year 700 A.D. are linguistically indistinguishable from Old German texts of the same era. By the time of Chaucer, in the 1300s, the two languages had diverged significantly.
Today, English is still a language with a Germanic basis, both in terms of its core vocabulary and much of its grammar, with a significant infusion of Franco-Latin vocabulary.
