The whole article is really interesting — Of melting pots and mongrel languages:
If a few soldiers, 958 years ago, had shown a bit more self-restraint, we’d all be speaking a different English. We wouldn’t, for example, know the word different. Or example.
The soldiers were English, but they spoke what we know as Anglo-Saxon. The Angles and Saxons … drove the native Britons off to the west and north, taking their Gaelic languages with them …. The territory that the raiders stole became Angle-Land, which in time became England. And thus Germans became the first English.