The English language, a member of the West Germanic language family, originated in medieval England and has become the most widely spoken language in the world due to the vast colonial empire. The ancestors of the British people, the Anglo-Saxon tribes, were one of the Germanic tribes that later migrated to the British Isles and became known as England. Both of these names derive from Anglia, a region on the Baltic Peninsula. The language is closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, and its vocabulary has been influenced by other Germanic languages, especially the North Germanic languages, and was largely written in Latin and French.
