Abstract:
The English language emerged as a separate, identifiable unit much earlier than the Romance languages. One reason for this is the situation in England after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Romans conquered Britain in the first century AD and held it for 300 years, yet Latin did not become the spoken language, as it did in present-day France, Spain, and Portugal. People in Britain retained their language, which belonged to the Celtic group of Indo-European languages.
