Who were the first people who spoke English?

Mistico   Sat Dec 01, 2007 2:32 am GMT
The French?
The Romans?
The Celts?
The Germans?
The Vikings?
The AngloSaxons?
The people in King Arthur?

People have different beliefs. Who do you think were the first spokers were?
JeLèK   Sat Dec 01, 2007 3:16 am GMT
English, as most of natural languages, is the result of an evolution.

You can't really determine a point of time when people started speaking English.

An example are the Romance languages:
Classical Latin evolutionized into Vulgar Latin and then into Romance languages. It's quite impossible to say when people stopped speaking Latin and started speaking a Romance language.
Skippy   Sat Dec 01, 2007 5:03 pm GMT
The Anglo-Saxons, hence the tendency of many to use "Old English" and "Anglo-Saxon" interchangeably.