English is a member of the Germanic language family, but with significant influence from [[French]], a Romance language. This is largely due to the conquest of Saxon-speaking [[England]] by [[French]] speaking Normans in 1066 AD. English owes some of its structure (its system of auxiliary verbs, for example) to French. In terms of the lexicon, Old English words are a minority (though they predominate when one looks at the most commonly-used words) whereas words from [[French]] are more numerous, followed by [[Latin]], [[Greek]], and other modern languages. | English is a member of the Germanic language family, but with significant influence from [[French]], a Romance language. This is largely due to the conquest of Saxon-speaking [[England]] by [[French]] speaking Normans in 1066 AD. English owes some of its structure (its system of auxiliary verbs, for example) to French. In terms of the lexicon, Old English words are a minority (though they predominate when one looks at the most commonly-used words) whereas words from [[French]] are more numerous, followed by [[Latin]], [[Greek]], and other modern languages. |