ENGLISH.

Hey, Vsauce Michael here, and today, we're going to talk about this.

What's happening right now— the English language.

A language spoken by more than a billion people with many, many different accents.

And according to last year's Harvard Google study,

a language with more than a million words

growing at a rate of 8500 new words every single year.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Where did English begin?

Well, for that answer, we're going to have to go all the way back to the year 400,

and even earlier to this little Germanic peninsula

jutting off at an angle inhabited by people who appropriately were called Angles.

Now, these Angles began immigrating to an island named Britain.

In fact, there were so many Angles there,

you may as well have called it Angle Land.

Angle Land, England.

Before they had Latin characters,

they wrote their language not in letters, but in what are known as roons.

And everything was fine and dandy until 1066

when the Normans invaded and won.

One of the neatest changes that still affects us today

is the fact that this new Norman ruling class

would refer to the meat they were served using their own words like beef or pork.

But the poor old Anglo Saxons who had to tend to the animals

still used their early old English words, for instance, cow and pig.

And to this day, that is why English is one of the very few languages on Earth

that has a different name for the meat of an animal than the name of the animal it came from.