Over the 1,500 years of its existence, the English language has had a long history of contact with other  languages, a fact that becomes very visible if you consider the many loanwords that belong to the vocabulary of Present-Day Standard English. In this course we will first describe the basic features that make English a Germanic language, and then move on to focus on the many different contact situations from Old English to Modern English that have influenced and shaped the language that we know today - mostly its vocabulary, but also aspects of its morphology, syntax and pronunciation.