he Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians were tribes of Germanic people who originally came from the area of current northern Germany and Denmark. These tribes invaded Britain during the Roman occupation and again once it had ended. They settled in areas of the south and east of the country.

East Anglia

5th century

Old English

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes that came to the British isles during the Anglo-Saxon migrations (5th century CE) were settlers. The Angles were not vikings because they did not get into longboats and go sailing around the coastlines of Europe raiding everything they could find.

Norwegian is closer to English than either Danish or Swedish. In fact, it’s often described as the easiest of the three languages to learn.

They do have similar origin, but Norwegian is closer to Welsh than it is to German. Norwegian grammer is much simpler than German grammer, closer to older German dialects such as Schwäbisch or Swiss-German. If you speak English, German or Dutch you will understand more than half of written words as a zero beginner.

Frisian is the language most closely related to English and Scots, but after at least five hundred years of being subject to the influence of Dutch, modern Frisian in some aspects bears a greater similarity to Dutch than to English; one must also take into account the centuries-long drift of English away from Frisian.

The Frisians are a West Germanic ethnic group indigenous to the coastal regions of the Netherlands and northwestern Germany. They inhabit an area known as Frisia and are concentrated in the Dutch provinces of Friesland and Groningen and, in Germany, East Frisia and North Frisia (which was a part of Denmark until 1864).

We know of Viking attacks and a few hoards, but otherwise history and archaeology show us that Frisia belonged to Francia in the Viking Age (800-1050). By being both in the sphere of influence of Franks and Vikings, Frisia develops a central position in the intercultural contact in the Viking Age.

Frisian. Definition of Frisian (Entry 2 of 2) 1 : a member of a people that inhabit principally the Netherlands province of Friesland and the Frisian islands in the North Sea. 2 : the Germanic language of the Frisian people.

Overall, the closeness of the Anglo-Frisian languages is partly from shared vocabulary, and mostly because of how recently they were mutually intelligible. By those standards, linguists actually consider Scots more closely related than Frisian – among those who don’t simply consider it a dialect of English.

The written origins of the language have been traced back to 1250 BC in the late Shang dynasty. Along with Tamil, Chinese is one of the oldest surviving languages in the world. Hebrew: While many believe that Hebrew has been used for the last 5000 years, its earliest written examples date only to 1000BC.

The closest language to English, Frisian, is partly mutually-intelligible with Dutch and this has been shown in peer-reviewed studies.

Frisian