the language spoken by the people dwelling in England and the United States and in their possessions and colonies. The foundation of this language is the speech of the ancient Angles and Saxons, who separated themselves from their Teutonic brothers in the north of Europe and crossed to England in the fifth and sixth centuries A. D. They found here the Britons, speaking a Celtic dialect; and though, after one hundred fifty years of hard and incessant fighting, they succeeded in driving the natives to the north and west, that ancient language has persisted to this day among the Welsh, and our own language owes to it a number of words. The highly inflected Anglo-Saxon language was little modified until the Norman Conquest, when the proud conquerors made French the language of the court and of law. The English people would not accept this new speech, and for two hundred years two languages with many dialects were spoken in this little island. About 1250 there began the amalgamation of these two tongues, together with the dropping of the complicated inflections. In less than two hundred years this new language had come into the schools and could be heard in the pleadings at law; our modern English language had been pretty well established. Of this new composite language, the Anglo-Saxon had furnished the common words of the home, the farm and every-day life; while the Norman had introduced the words that pertained to the court, society, sports and law. Under the Italian influence, which lasted from 1400 to 1660, many more words of Latin origin were incorporated into our speech; and the recent developments in science have brought a large influx of technical terms, generally derived from the Latin and the Greek. So in thirteen or fourteen centuries an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of possibly 30,000 words has expanded into the rich and full English language of over 200,000 words, of which a large majority have been adopted from foreign tongues. Yet the grammar of our language and the vocabulary of our common speech are in the main still the vigorous Anglo-Saxon. See PHILOLOGY; LITERATURE, subhead English Literature; GRAMMAR; LANGUAGE, METHODS OF TEACHING.